


And the darkness all around to remind me of all these

by peacefulJ



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: A lot of 80s references, Angst, Billy is stupid and Steve likes it, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, I love my damaged boys, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, POV Alternating, Past Violence, S3 spoilers, Unnecessarily detailed, but also a different S3 ending because yeah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 10:56:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 56,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20424824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefulJ/pseuds/peacefulJ
Summary: “Are you some kind of maid, Harrington?” it’s mocking and not nice and Steve laughs a bit.“Yeah. The shittiest one, though. I can only make eggs and bacon, probably some overcooked pasta.”Billy’s eyes are on him, he’s considering, Steve can tell. It’s that Billy thing where he throws back a bit his head, chin up and looks at you with challenging blue eyes. The context is so different from the school’s hallways and the showers. “Jesus, Harrington, you’re always so willing, someday you will get hurt.”It should sound like a joke, Steve thinks by the grin on Billy’s heart-shaped lips, but it actually feels like a premonition. What Billy cannot imagine, though, is that Steve craves for it to happen. To hurt. Because it feels so sweet being the one trying his utter best but giving over all of his control to destiny, death even.





	And the darkness all around to remind me of all these

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there! I finally decided to start publishing this...thing, which is basically a late hour rant born in my long summer back home. I’m nervous, but also really excited. Please, feel free to tell me what you think, if you have suggestions, even if you hate it, I appreciate the honesty! A little disclaimer about the language and the 80s references: I tried my best and did a lot of research to be as accurate as possible, forgive me if something is wrong or misplaced.
> 
> This being said, I think the story will be split into three parts, even if I still have to work on the second and third (I’m a mess, sorry), I hope it will turn out as I imagine it.
> 
> Thank you for giving all of this a chance. Enjoy!
> 
> PJ
> 
> P.S. the work and chapters’ titles are from a beautiful poem by Jacques Prevert, “Paris At Night”, check it out!

Cold.

Cold and black. 

That’s all there is around. And maybe some fear, but just the memory of it, back in his mind, where it flashes forward in his eyes. Back and forth. Now it’s here and now it’s not. But the cold stays and he drowns in the black.

The sensation left behind tastes a lot like loss. Of whom, he does not know. His mother? Perhaps himself. He does not care. He is so tired he could sleep himself into oblivion, a greater one than the one he is experiencing right now, if possible.

The cold falters a bit and he takes advantage of the break, losing conscience in the blink of an eye.

The next time he’s aware of the low temperature around him he can feel his skin crawl all over his body. It unsettles him in a dark way, makes him understand that whatever causes that sensation creeping inside his guts is not natural. It freaks him out and a scream dies in his throat, right under the sea of goose bumps. 

Fear. Back and forth. And nothing comes out. At least, he does not hear a sound. The black comes always with a lot of that. 

Back and forth.

In the distance, he can sense a regular bip. He wouldn’t know how else to describe it, again it feels like a memory. Of someone else, though. 

Maybe Neil has sent him off for good, with no way back. The feeling of calmness that that hope brings is the sweetest thing Billy has had in his chest lately. 

But he should have figured by now that good things like an easy way out of a shitty life are simply not what’s in plan for him. Easy does not come across Billy Hargrove’s path. Ever. 

In the dull cold, pitch black surroundings, the pallid outline of someone appears to Billy. A little someone. The scrawny figure in the distance is staring at him, once again he can feel it. A pair of big brown eyes that pierce through his aching skull and Billy feels like screaming once again.

And once again nothing comes out, his throat hurts and helplessly spasms. 

Scrawny steps closer, slowly.

Seven feet.  
~

“That’s some pile of _bullshit_” screeches Dustin from under the table. He’s down there to rescue one of the dices he’s thrown clumsily. “It’s a thirteen and you know it.”

Lucas, on his part, looks a lot less interested in the game, keeps looking over Will’s shoulders and sighs every once in a while. His feet bounce on the wood paneling of Byers’ house and Steve’s nerves are wearing thinner and thinner as the time goes by.

“Where’s the point in buying the Expert Set and not being even able to read the damn rules!?” hollers Dustin from under the table, still. 

And Steve is so done.

Joyce Byers and Jim said they would be back in “three hours. Top.” that morning, but outside is already dark and his ass has taken the couch’s pillows’ shape by osmosis. He is pretty sure the detailed process can be found in one of Nancy’s science cards. 

Looking at the moon, peeking through grey clouds, though, he finds himself not minding that much Hopper’s problem with lateness. He has nobody waiting for him at home, anyway. Plus, Joyce had smiled at him so sweetly and cooked a huge baking pan of lasagna that reminded him a bit of his grandma. Really, he does not mind.

Nancy’s brother gets to his side by the window and sighs in much the same way Sinclair has been for the whole day. Maybe the whole month.

“I don’t like it,” says Mike. He has a stain of tomato sauce on the white collar of his shirt. 

Steve does not divert his eyes from the dark forest surrounding the Byers’ house. It sends chills down his spine, so strong that not even the third cup of hot coffee he’s clutching on will be of any help. “I know. Me neither.”

The kid stays silent after that, but Steve cherishes the company. Feels less alone when a trace of adult awareness crosses the children’s eyes. Even though he feels a tad guilty after.

“My sister says hi, by the way. Sorry, forgot to tell you.”

Steve looks at him now and smiles tiredly, “Thanks.”

Nancy and her boyfriend have gone on a road trip. Final stop: New York City. They figured it would be the best way to take their minds off the fact that Death has knocked on their door once again. And, oh, their boss is dead, killed and decomposed to become part of a thirty feet monster from the Upside Down. Steve does not blame them for fleeing like that, would have done it himself if he only had the guts. With Robin, maybe.

Dustin’s lecture on the new version of Dungeons&Dragons makes even Mike’s eyes roll to the back of his head and Steve elbows him, grinning mischievously. He then glances at the wall clock and gets out “All righty, children! Time to go to bed. Brush your teeth, pee or whatever!”

Dustin groans, his hat forgotten somewhere under the table, but does not put up any fight. The bags under his eyes are enough of an explanation and Steve flops down on the old couch, closes his eyes not to look at them too much. The other kids silently obey and in less than ten minutes all of them have wished him goodnight.

Steve is now alone again. He feels like that a lot recently. And with recently he means the last five years of his life. He was slightly older than his bunch of shitheads when his parents decided he was enough of a man to stay days alone, in their big house, only the maids coming and going to make sure he was well fed and clean. 

He thinks about the fact that it is not a school night for him and a bittersweet sensation spreads inside him, from his chest up to his four limbs. He’s slouched, on the path of Memories, when Joyce enters the room, light brown coat on and a scarf that looks a lot like Jim’s on.

“Steve, love, I’m so sorry,” she whispers when she spots him. 

Steve shrugs and smiles sincerely. “No problem, Joyce, really. Had fun with the kids, keeps me occupied.”

It sounds very much like a confession, like something Steve has sworn not to bother anyone with. But he’s so tired and maybe all he needs are motherly eyes soothing him to sleep. 

Joyce gives him just that and pulls out a pillow and a blanket for him to crash there on her couch. “I don’t want you to crash while driving, sleep here?” but it’s not a real question, more like a piece of advice that smells of an order. A kind one, but still an order.

He thanks her and waits until she’s done in the washroom to quickly use it himself. He declines her offer of Jonathan’s pajamas and only takes off his shoes.

“How’s...” he does not know how to end the question. El? Max? Jim? Billy? So he doesn’t.

“Usual,” muffles Joyce around a forkful of cold lasagna. “She sees him, but it’s blurred. Not clear. Hop says she could use some rest but you know her,” she giggles a bit, it’s mostly lifeless.

He mimics her laugh, “Yeah. Stubborn like hell.”

Joyce looks at him with a small frown, offers with a gesture her plate, but Steve refuses it too. “‘Was very good, had plenty. Dustin ate, like, three plates.”

She smiles at that, her kind brown eyes matching perfectly with her dark hair and the rosy cheeks. Steve finds her beautiful, in a simple and raw way. Knowing about how brave and smart she is, then, does it for him. For Hopper too, clearly.

“Lucas?”

“Sighs a lot and stares languidly at the walls,” humors Steve, his fingers are patting on the denim of his jeans, following a tune he wouldn’t be able to name.

Joyce nods a bit, she looks sad again. Steve thinks she feels a bit too much sometimes, but admires it nonetheless. ”Max does not leave him a minute. It’s heartbreaking, really. Poor thing does not want to eat either. Her parents are getting worried, she says Billy’s dad keeps asking her questions and she doesn’t know what to tell him.”

It’s shit, to be honest. They came up with the brilliant idea of lying to Mr. Hargrove and his wife about Billy. They told them he had decided to hit the road, even wrote a message for them, written by Nancy who managed to make it look like Billy’s handwriting to scaring levels. Max had brought about his english notes and, peeking over Nancy’s shoulder, Steve had been surprised to find it so neat and well-kept. He did not imagine Hargrove as an A-student.

Clearly, there were a lot of things the bunch of them did not expect from him.

Max had been lying to her mother and step-dad about her brother all that time. She told them Neil Hargrove did not take the news as calmly as Susan, he had broke one or two things before storming off. Presumably to go and search for his rebel son. Little did he know, Billy was actually in a governmental structure just outside Hawkins, fighting for his life after having put himself between the Mind Flyer and El.

“What does Hop think about it?”

Joyce sighs, ”He can’t pull off the fake missing report much longer. They’ll find out, eventually.”

Steve does not get it. ”Billy’s eighteen, he can do whatever. Plus, his father is a prick, no wonder someone would want to get out of that hell,” his tone is harsh. He does not mean to swear in front of Mrs. Byers, but this whole situation makes him angrier than expected. It keeps him on edge.

Just like the dark forest outside.

“I know, Steve, you’re right. Hop has his hands tied, though. Billy never reported his father and we are the ones actually trying to cover things up,” she looks pained, but Steve catches her resolution at the back of her eyes. The type of spirit that would fight everything and everyone to keep her loved ones safe.

Steve deflates and nods once, he gets it. He would do anything for his ‘pack’ too. He kind of has. 

They stay silent then, each of them lost somewhere in their own heads, until Joyce gets up from the armchair with a little jump that startles Steve. She apologizes by patting his head twice and wishes him a goodnight.

“Goodnight, Joyce.”

When Steve thought he could not appreciate the woman more, she leaves the room without turning off the light.

Steve rolls around on his swivel chair, the Supermarket’s uniform a bit tight for his chest. It has the name-tag of its last owner still on and a lot of people now greet him with a warm “George!” that he does not bother to correct. Actually, he likes being called George a lot, makes him feel like George Micheal and he kind of likes his music. A bit too gleeful for his taste, but not half bad. Not that he’s said this to anyone.

Joyce was kind enough to find him a job at her Supermarket after StarCourt pretty much blew up. The Scoops Ahoy’s days are now behind and he does not know how to feel about it. He may be missing seeing Robin and Erica everyday, but that place gives him shivers just at the thought of it, so he decides it’s better like this. Robin works two blocks from there anyway, at the arcade, and Erica stops by often to buy candy and to check on him, even though she would never admit on it.

Steve had even pointed out that candies sucked in his Supermarket, but Erica had just shushed him and told him that the day she makes a man decide what she likes is the day she can be damned. Steve did not argue that and just reached for her money in silence.

He’s now in the second isle, looking pointedly at magnets, like he often finds himself doing, when Max comes in.

She has a blank expression on her freckled face and barely acknowledges Steve’s presence before darting somewhere between the shelves. 

He sighs and waits a few seconds before going to find her. It’s not a challenge, really, since she’s standing in front of the big freezers’ doors, searching frantically something with her shockingly blue eyes.

“Eggos’ top left,” he says, pressing a shoulder on a glass door a few feet away from the redhead. She does not look at him and just gets on the tip of her toes to reach the yellow boxes. Steve’s not letting her go away without trying some more.”How are you, Max?”

Christ, he sounds annoying to his own hears. But honestly, what else should he do? He cares too much not to try.

The girl groans in response. Much more than Steve expected, actually. It gets him in a good mood. So he speaks again, “You reckon El would like some whipped cream as well?”

Max’s eyes fly over him for a second, like just now she’s noticing he’s standing there. Steve would dare to say she even looks a bit surprised by his presence, like George’s uniform is not enough of an indicator he works in the stupid place. “Yeah, good idea. Whipped cream.”

Steve grins widely, “On it, kiddo.”

He hears Max mumble under her breath the words “Whipped cream” once or twice more before he finds the right place on the shelf and handles her the bottles. She looks mental, grabbing them and using her purple t-shirt as a net for the food. 

Poor thing, Joyce said the night before. And Steve hates pity, he despises it, but looking at the thirteen-year-old girl in those conditions makes him feel just that. With his brows up in worry he asks her if she needs something else, but she does not register his voice and walks away.

He figures it’s best to leave her alone and goes back to the cash, slumps down on his boring chair in his boring spot and almost misses the obnoxious hat he used to wear at StarCourt. That was a look, he reckons.

He gets distracted by Ms. Bellows walking in and beaming at him, “George!”

He smiles kindly and waves at the woman, his head stuck to Max pacing around like a trapped soul.

By the time Ms. Bellows approaches the cash with her cart full of greens and magazines, Max is done trotting all over the place and swirls out of the shop in less than a second. Steve swears Ms. Bellows skirt swings in the wind Max’s exiting creates.

“Weird girl,” comments the woman, a joyful smile still on. 

Steve can’t disagree with that and waits to be alone again to fill the register with approximately enough money to cover for the weird girl’s shopping.  
~

There were seagulls.

It hurts him. All over. The cold does nothing to anesthetize the pain growing in his bones, muscles, everything. 

He logically knows those words are not meant to make him feel this bad, but at the same time he can’t help but fight against Scrawny, trying to crash his skin by repeating them. He feels so lonely, there’s water at his feet but it’s not the sea, it’s cold like everything else and he hates it passionately.

“Go away,” he manages to grit through clenched teeth and pushes himself to step closer to the intruder. He knows Scrawny shouldn’t be there, he knows that is a place in his mind. He’s probably dead and he does not understand why he has to put up with this type of intrusion, like there is no Rest In Peace for Billy fucking Hargrove.

Yellow sandals, too.

“Go away!” he rants. It stings and stretches. 

And the hat with a blue ribbon.

Billy falters, but succeeds in getting out another step, before collapsing on himself, like he’s only some bones and flesh not well kept together. A memory of something he should have done but didn’t, something else he has left incomplete. 

Scrawny is so close now, he can feel the breath coming out of their nose and mouth. It’s frantic.

A drop of blood falls near Billy’s hands, where they are, planted on the flooded black floor. He recognizes blood well, it stains his fingers for an instant and then disappears.

Billy starts crying.

“Mom...mom, please.” 

Usually, by the time he starts sobbing and calling for his mother, the figure leaves him alone. They linger just enough to make his afterlife a non-living hell and then leave, just like that, some twisted nightmare.

Billy’s used to those too.

“Please,” he repeats, goes as far as crawling forward and then falls completely prone on the wet floor. 

Billy.

He falls unconscious.  
~

Steve hates stragglers. He has to be on time or he’ll have a stroke, that’s exactly what will happen. He knows it with certainty. And Robin is such a punctuality-hater, she could not be on time for dear life, let alone to have some fries and a milkshake with him at the diner.

The place is exactly in-between their two workplaces and they hate traditions, they have established that, but Steve wouldn’t know how else to call their way of meeting up there every Wednesday evening to chat about nothing at all.

Sometimes even Erica and Dustin join the party, leaving Steve to pay for all of their food. Which he does pleasantly. 

He’s already inside, not wanting to freeze his ass off in the chilly October night of Hawkins. Under the blinding neon lights of the diner he can spot a couple of lonely people, probably habitués like himself with nothing better to do on a week-night than engulf pre-heated junk food. 

“Before you start: I’m not late, I’m elegantly making my date wait,” comes from behind him and he doesn’t have to turn around to know Robin has a big smirk on her smart-ass face.

She sits down in front of him with a loud plop of the leathered booth. She looks flushed, has probably run over there and her cheeks are so red Steve has to hold back a sneer. She’s just in a t-shirt sporting the title of some not-so-pop film he does not know nor give a shit about.

“Whatever,” he flips her off and grabs the menu. Like he will not order the same damn thing he always does. French fries with cheddar and a cherry milkshake. Which Robin labels as the “Grossest thing ever.”

Whatever indeed.

“The knob-heads?” asks Robin, placing one of her feet on his right knee, under the table and starting to pick at her hair’s split ends like the disgusting animal she is.

“Not coming tonight,” he scowls at her foot, but stays silent. He knows it’s useless, Robin is savage just like that.

“For shit, Erica owed me, like, two grands worth of fries.”

An old man turns around from his plate and gives his friend a dirty look for the loud tone she’s using. Robin does not notice, while Steve waves an apology, awkwardly.

Robin laughs at him, “You’re such a good boy. It’s a pity I don’t like dick, really.”

And with that she’s off to the counter, bouncing like a little brat. Steve has a little crush on her, still, does not think it will ever go away. And he’s fine with it.

He gets up and follows Robin, orders his cheddar french fries and milkshake under Robin’s amused eyes and waits for the order to be ready. They chit chat about their day, Robin looses herself in a story about the porn magazines Keith keeps in the stockroom and Steve feels almost sick at the vivid image of greasy Keith getting off over plastic boobs.

“He tried touching mine once,” Robin scoffs. Steve has heard this other story a million times, at least, but laughs again anyway, like it’s the first time he hears about this and finds it the most hilarious thing in the world. He does because he loves Robin and he loves being around her. If he can count the people he cares about on two hands, Robin is definitely one of the first fingers. 

And he feels a little mad, being this affectionate of someone he’s known for so little. But, he guesses, being stuck in a Russian pentagon for days does stuff to your bonding speed.

“Can I crash at yours later?” she pokes at his ankle with her dirty sneaker and steals one of his fries. “Gross,” she murmurs with it still in her mouth.

Steve pats her hand away and tells her “Sure,” while stealing some long gulps from her chocolate milkshake. A smirk on his face that makes it worth the brain freeze that comes right after.

“I hate you so much.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Steve deadpans. 

“Not last time I checked, Harrington. Pretty sure you wanted to do it on the floor of the StarCourt’s public restroom. What you say?” she licks the remaining sauce from her fingers and Steve kicks her lightly to stop her from screaming stupid things for everyone (only the old grumpy man and the waiter, really) to hear.

Steve gets up and goes pay for their meal. When done, he turns around, ready to join Robin once again and finding her standing up on the booth. “Oh, Robin, I want you to be the mother of my kids! Please say yes, I’ll shave all of my hair if you don’t!” she whines, making fun of his pathetic ass.

Steve turns back to the waiter who has a face like he could not care less about what happens in front of him and pays for the old man’s dinner as well.

He’ll get poor one day, only by paying for shit that tastes like paper and glue.

He drags his friend out of there and drives back to his place, the biggest house in the street and, Steve bets all he has on it, the emptiest too.

“What about Allison Mitchell?” Robin asks, she’s let herself in like she owns the damn place and now she’s turning on the television, shoes long forgotten in his living room, probably feet apart from one another.

“Are you quite finished?”

Steve is too tired to put up with Robin trying to set him up. She always does it; Steve thinks is because she subtly feels guilty about liking girls and having rejected him not long ago. Steve is very fine as he is, he gets, now, that was the adrenaline of sure death talking. And maybe also that weird Russian drug they injected them with in the torture room. Dustin busting his balls about Robin’s attractiveness had not helped at all. But still.

“Millicent Melroy?” 

Steve gets to the stairs and starts getting to his room, but is at ear-reach when Robin adds “No wait, I’d fuck that. Forget all about Melroy!”

He hates her, he swears.

When he comes back downstairs in his sweatpants and t-shirt he uses to sleep, Robin is watching some horrible cartoons on a channel Steve did not even know existed. When he sees that stupid fucker, He-Man, fighting some gigantic spider, he diverts his eyes and focuses on the corner of his mother’s last painting. It’s a valley, most probably an Italian one, he recognizes the colors and the shapes from way back in his childhood, but could not name the place. He wonders for a moment if his mother is looking at that exact landscape right now.

“Giant spiders,” Robin puffs out, her tone is meant to be as light as always, but it’s not and in no time she’s turned the television back off.

“What’re you doing tomorrow, sod?” she shuffles his shoulder until he looks at her and rolls his eyes.

He shrugs, does not really know, he doesn’t plan lately. “Whatever. I’ve got work in the morning, probably baby-sitting later. Why?”

It’s now Robin’s turn to shrug, “Was thinking about heading to the quarry, what you say?” her accent is really weird. Like everything else about her, Steve ponders.

“Yeah. Maybe,” he concedes. They both know he’ll follow her wherever if it means not being alone in Harringtons’ mansion, where demons (visible and not) can get in stealthily. “Could bring the kids along, they could use some fun before it’s too cold to do shit.”

Robin scoffs and shoves him, “You’re such a dad, honestly.”

“Thank you,” says Steve, sincerely flattered.

That ends the conversation and they opt for doing nothing and finishing off each other’s made-up lullabies. They mix up lyrics from actual songs and personalized bits and the outcome is filthy and idiotic. Steve loves feeling like a teenager again, until reality hits back and he has to face all of those bottled up emotions.

“How’s Hargrove doing?” Robin asks all of a sudden, Steve is still chuckling about a rhyme Robin has made with the word blunt. 

And it’s not like he does not want to talk about it, but he doesn’t know what to say. Billy Hargrove has entered their little It Will Give You Nightmares Club involuntarily and unconsciously, literally. Steve feels disconnected from that, to the point where sometimes he forgets all about Billy and his inducted coma. And he feels like shit.

“Fuck me if I know. Only Hop and Joyce get to go there with El and Max.”

He does not know why but he sounds disappointed about it, almost angry. Is it his constant need to keep everything under control after he found out Barbara Holland had been eaten alive in his goddam pool? Yes, probably.

“It’s not like there’s much to see anyway, Steve,” she reasons, caressing his scalp through the thick hair. It soothes him a lot, calms his nerves. But her words rub at him in the wrong way, it’s more a distant sensation than a put together thought, but Steve rubs it off him and gets closer to Robin, lets her drop her head on his shoulder.

“Nah, you right. I just don’t like being treated like one of the eight-graders, you know?”

Robin nods on the soft fabric of his t-shirt and he knows she gets it. She gets it like maybe no one else can. Not the children with their tight group and the friends don’t lie rule, not Chief Hopper and Joyce, too far off on the scale of responsibility to get his sometimes total lack of it and even Nancy and Jonathan in their love bubble that still, to this day, makes him sick to the bone.

Robin is an outsider, she’s alone as much as he is and she’s been rejected by a lot of people as well. She even knows how to scoop ice-cream like he does. It’s stupid. Until it’s not anymore.

“Tricia Powell!” Robin jumps, like she’s been thinking about their ex girl schoolmates non-stop during their whole conversation. Which likely corresponds to the truth.

“She ate a whole stick of glue in front of me in eleventh grade. Still stinks of it.”

“You have high standards, Stevie,” Robin tickles the stubble on his chin with the top of her index. “You won’t be in marriageable age forever. And your hair will eventually start to fall. One piece at the time.”

Steve groans and throws his head back, hitting the not-so-comfortable headrest of the modern couch his mother had convinced his father to buy. The same they later argued about, both claiming it as theirs in the divorce papers. He had been endowed with the sofa, at last, one with room for at least four people and where he sat alone after classes, eating whatever the maids had cooked for him the night before. 

Pathetic. But, at least, modern.

They nod off to sleep just like that, lullabying one another, finding rhymes for Greasy Keith at the arcade.

The next day he drives his BMW to the quarry. 

Robin had taken the seat beside him screaming “Shot gun!” like mad and running in front of the pack of kids when he picked them up at the arcade. Her hair is suddenly a shade of purple at the edges and Steve had just made an impressed face at it, passing some through his thumb and index.

Dustin, Mike and Lucas are in the backseat, elbowing each-other to gain some centimeters of space for their growing bodies. He even spots Dustin using his ‘no joints superpower’ while Will softly chuckles from the boot. His bowl cut pops up in Steve’s rearview mirror and he checks on him maybe ten times on their way to the quarry.

There’s this look about Will Byers that makes him overprotective over the kid. His huge hazel eyes sometimes get lost on thin air, like he can see something that’s not actually there. And it unnerves Steve to the bone, because he knows that, somewhere, there’s something. Will’s mother would also kill everyone on sight if something happened to her son, so Steve tells himself is partly self-preservation. Even if he knows he does not have any of that. Not anymore.

“Steve, you heard something from Hop?” asks Mike from behind him, he feels his hands planted on his seat and the boy hovering over him, can feel the prickling need inside of the kid to just know.

Steve glances quickly at him over his shoulder and then talks without leaving the street with his eyes. He’s responsible like that these days, “No, kiddo, you know they can’t really call from there,” he says, perceives Mike’s desolation at that and adds,”’M sure everything’s fine, though,” which is lame and not exactly the truth, but Mike sighs and throws himself back on his seat.

Robin shoots him a look that Steve does not really know how to interpret, he shakes his head once and brushes his fingers on her purple hair. Dustin in the rearview is back doing his weird mouth sounds. Steve rolls his eyes and shushes him.

The fact is that Henderson does not know what Robin told him. Steve is not going to snitch on her and that is none of his business anyway, he’s fine with whatever she is and she will tell when she’s ready. Even if that’s going to be in a distant future. Steve gets that on so many levels, he empathizes with his friend. But Dustin still tries to play matches with the two of them and it’s getting old.

“Why not!? You’re King Steve! She’ll tumble at your feet just like that!” Dustin has said once, snapping his fingers with his usual mesmerized look, all mouth and shiny eyes.

“Man, I told you, it’s not like that” Steve repeats every damn time, but it goes over Dustin’s curly head like a blow in the wind. 

“Suzie fell for my confidence, and I do not have half of yours, I just don’t get it,” is the kid finishing line usually, to which Steve always sighs and passes on. 

They arrive at the quarry’s shore a little after three in the afternoon. The sun is warm and there is no wind at all, water is calm and shines green in front of them. Steve is relieved, he doesn’t know he was worrying about the boys getting cold until he does.

“Listen up, boys! No dead-locks, no extra swinging on the rope and no, for the love of God, pulling pranks on me because I’d rather be somewhere else than here with you knob-heads,” Steve lists, but his tone is far away from harsh, he ruffles Will’s hair to let him know that he’s joking. Like it’s necessary, every single one of them, Robin included, knows he would go out of his way to just be with some other human being.

After that they all run away and splash in the water in no time, Robin laughs at his startled expression and they both place their towels on the stubble of grass near his car. The girl starts chewing on some candy, while sunbathing.

It’s a nice time, Steve tells himself, he should take breaks like this more often, to just go and wonder somewhere with his friends. Locking themselves up in houses with plenty of terrible memories is not exactly the way to get over said memories. Plus, he likes the way his skin frizzles in the sun, he has the impression of having wasted the whole summer inside StarCourt or chasing monsters and now he’s making up for it. Kind of.

Robin starts telling him about this girl, Mary she thinks is her name, who stopped by the arcade three times this week. Robin keeps repeating it must be for her being there, because she just paces around for a bit and then leaves, not touching a single game. 

“Maybe she’s targeting Greasy Keith, what you say?” Steve humors, he mimics her weird cut off accent at the end of sentences and Robin pushes him by the hot shoulder, making a face when she finds it sweatier than expected.

“Like hell.”

Old Steve would have pointed that Mary is a lame name anyway and he wouldn’t bother wasting time on a weirdo like that. But Old Steve is dead now, like his parents’ marriage and a lot of people from the Hawkins’ Labs. So he simply shuts up and hums whenever he thinks is the right time to do so, in between Robin’s rambling.

Plus, who’s he to say that girls with boring façades are not worth the trouble? It would be hypocritical since his heart still skips a beat when Nancy looks at him with too much intention. Nancy Wheeler, the most water-and-soap looking girl he could find at Hawkins High. He’s such a mess, all the time.

He takes glimpses at the kids every now and then, counts them over and over again, tries not to make it too obvious because he would not hear the end of it. They refer to him as “Hen Steve” and it does not matter, actually, but he’d prefer shielding them from his incurable anxiety. Wants them to have a life as dull and serene as possible. From now on, clearly.

“Millicent’s brother, Bob or something, throws a party on Saturday, King Steve’s up for it?” Robin chews on her gum and puts on a bit of sunscreen, missing several squirts of them and leaving her face covered in white splatters. She looks like a moron, with her tongue all over the place making faces at him like a party is the only thing he was expecting to happen.

Steve does not open his eyes, under the big sunglasses, and passes a hand through his thick hair, considering. “Joyce’ll ask me to watch the kids,” he reasons. He’s grateful for that, though, a party does not sound like the perfect thing to do when he barely has the strength to drive around town and not crawl up into a ball of panic.

“Don’t they have other parental figures? Jesus,” Robin scoffs, she pokes at his shoulder with just the tip of a finger, too grossed out by his shiny skin. “And Millicent and I could get it down, honestly, so be my wingman like the sweet love you are.”

Steve does not answer to that, just watches over to the water, where the boys are talking in circle, probably plotting something against them. 

When, after ten minutes, a bucket of freezing water is splashed over his styled hair, he figures that a party without pre-teens in it would do him some good.  
~

He can see the waves, now. Again, he can’t actually see them, but he senses their presence, hears the sound of them in the distance. 

They’re tall but, for once, Billy is not scared. He’d dive right into it if he could, hoping to never have to come back up. Maybe he’d find his mother there. Why not?

Scrawny stands beside him, takes his hand and it feels like warm air on his skin, nothing material or solid in the slightest. He can’t see what the figure looks like, either, but he’s not that afraid of them anymore. Scrawny usually brings warm wind and talks softly about his mother, so he’s stopped fighting it and just goes with the water flow.

Seven feet. 

Scrawny keeps repeating it and Billy nods, he agrees, they’re the exact waves of that day, he can tell.

He wishes he could feel the California sun on his skin too, but knows better than ask for something that simply does not exist where he is. 

He’d like to say something, anything, to Scrawny. Ask him, or her, where they are and what is really happening, but speaking feels so tiring and he cannot bring himself to do that.

Billy falls asleep with Scrawny next to him, whispering about his mom’s dress and the golden sand.  
~ 

Steve meets Jim Hopper on Friday morning. He walks into the Market with his heavy pace and goes directly toward the cash, where Steve/George is playing with some balled up receipts, trying to center the bin some feet away. He reckons he would still be a challenge for anyone at basketball, he does not miss a shot.

“Chief,” Steve greets him, his game instantly forgotten and his chest popping out where he suddenly stands as straight as a flagpole. 

Hopper grunts his answer and takes off his hat, he is sporting his full uniform and Steve can’t hide the awe it causes him every time. He feels intimidated too, but that’s a reminiscence of Old Steve putting himself in stupid troubles and answering questions about Barbara Holland. He had tried to hide their underage drinking at the time, but Jim called out his bluff instantly, a tired look on his big cop face.

“She’s made it,” Jim only says, he’s looking at Steve like those words should be meaningful to him. Steve is lost for a second and Jim rolls his eyes, landing them on the security camera in the right corner of the shop. Looks back at Steve and arches his eyebrows, waits for him to catch up. “Jane’s found the boy. There’s a contact there, whatever.”

“Oh.” 

Billy Hargrove, he means Billy. Steve is glad about it, but he tenses up under Jim’s stare. “Oh,” he just repeats, like a stupid fuck.

Hopper sighs and moves his thick boots over to the sweets bags near him. Takes a handful of Nerds and grins placing them on the black belt of the cash. “El likes these things,” there’s affection in his voice, to the point of sirupy. Steve smiles back, a bit more relaxed and grateful that Jim took the time to pass by and tell him. It makes him feel important, in some way.

“What’s the plan now, Hop?” Steve finally gets out, he thinks straight again. Jim is a good cop.

“The plan,” Jim echoes, “is that we hope the boy doesn’t freak out too much when Owens’ peers wake him up.”

Steve nods slowly. He doesn’t ask anything else about Billy, even if he’d have an avalanche of questions, all piling up against his tongue. He simply asks if there’s anything he can do to help.

“They’re waking him tomorrow, mind to watch closely his sister? She can’t be there and she’s being a little brat about it. Unstoppable, that one.”

Steve smiles, it’s some sort of sad, the thought of Max being this restless is a lot. Steve nods again, “Sure thing, Hop. Count on me.”

Fuck Bob Melroy’s stupid party, he has better things to do than get shitfaced at a stranger’s house.

“Thanks, kid, appreciate your help,” Jim pats fervently his shoulder and Steve covers his flinch with a cough. 

Chief Hopper hands him a dollar bill and tells him to keep the rest, then heads for the door with his pack of candies in the hollow of his hat. “Joyce says hi and that there’s some frozen pizza at hers if the kids are hungry.”

Steve thumbs up at Hopper like a middle-schooler and slouches on the swivel chair only once the Sheriff has disappeared on his service Jeep. He feels some type of numb, he has to clench and unclench his fists to reactivate the blood stream there. 

He makes a point with himself to start eating something in the mornings and ignore the nausea they always bring.

Steve is sorry for Billy Hargrove, has not ever loved the guy, not with the way he talked about Nancy or how he beat the shit out of Steve’s face back at Byers’ house. He’d had bruises for weeks after that. He is not famous for holding grudges, though, and what then happened to Billy was terrifying enough for Steve to completely forget whatever had happened between the two of them.

Billy is just another victim of something too big to put into words, like Steve and everyone among his friends. Whether Mike Wheelers or Dustin like it or not, he’s been introduced to their little exclusive pack of mental toddlers and crazy adults, where Steve fits somewhere in-between. And he knows, he knows, he should do a little more than just baby-sit around.

“Fuck,” he hisses when the small paper ball he’s thrown misses the bin completely. 

Robin is not happy about him ditching her for the party, but by her tone over the phone he understands that, once again, she gets it. Steve swears he owes her something big for all the times he messes up with her plans because he’s useless. She blows a kiss over the line and then closes the conversation.

Steve chuckles softly with the background of Duran Duran still in his head from Robin’s room. 

It’s around six and he is about to close the shop. During the day hardly ten people have come in to buy something and Steve is tired and bored, feels like he’s not doing enough with his life. And he knows his dad would totally agree, he would also tell him to “man up some” and stop whining about things he can change, start considering what he wants from life.

Steve doesn’t know. Anything, but mainly what he wants. He’s sure his desire flies away from the isles of food and house products of that place or from yellow and green ice-cream in cones. He straightforwardly knows that he does not want to leave town just yet, but eventually...maybe one day.

Now he feels the weight of his roots in Hawkins planting him to the floor, to the people. 

Steve drives directly to Byers’s house, knocks in that secret code Jim has talked to him about. Twice, once and then three times.

Joyce Byers opens the door with a welcoming smile breaking her face in two perfect halves. She’s so beautiful Steve feels charmed on the spot. He enters and gets a general greeting from the room, slightly off, but Steve beams at all of them nonetheless.

“Okay, so do whatever Steve tells you and don’t eat shit,” Hopper appears from the kitchen, his everyday clothes on and the car keys in his right hand, dangling where he plays with them.

Joyce scowls at him for cursing, but it’s with a sweet smile Jim gets sheepish under like a six and a half foot tall man would not, normally. He pushes her gently to the door with a hand on her shoulder and she blow-kisses them goodbye. 

Steve spots Eleven and Jim exchanging a meaningful glaze. Then they’re out, door closed behind their backs.

Steve sucks in a breath and turns around, the kids are scattered all over the place, silent, everyone is minding their own business with a frown or deep sighs.

“All right, babies,” he catches their attention, voice loud and too joyful, even for his usual self. “Who wants some frozen pizza?” 

Only Dustin raises his hand; Steve feels suddenly too old for this.

Eventually, almost everyone eats a slice of the tasteless pizza. Steve has burnt it so now the crust is black and the whole house reeks of bad cooking skills. 

Eleven has been sitting there, arms crossed, staring intently at the empty plate and saying less than usual, which really, is saying a lot. Steve has tried asking her about Max’s whereabouts, but Sinclair answered for her and motioned with his head of pitch black curls to Will’s room’s door.

And that was it, Steve hasn’t asked again.

“Well, kiddos, not a school night! A movie? Anyone?” 

Dustin grumbles about some re-run of a sci-fi fic Steve has never heard of and slowly, dragging their feet, they all fit in front of the television with sad expressions that do nothing to help Steve’s mood. He cleans up in the kitchen as slowly as humanly possible not to sit with them and be depressed.

Once he’s done (he suspects he’s leaving it shinier than when he got there), Steve dries off his hands on the stained kitchen napkin on the counter and takes in a few breaths. It’s time for him to go check on Max. He’d rather deal with another demidog, but he has to make sure she’s safe and sound, does not need anything. Even someone to talk to.

Ten pairs of eyes are on him when he heads to the dark hallway. Flashes of him, Nancy and Byers being there, trying to burn the demigorgon alive, catch him as goosebumps start running down his spine. He has to center himself with an hovering brush over the wall, feel something solid near him, know he won’t fall in some devil hole full of teeth and death.

He successfully reaches the door to Will’s room, a stack of drawings covers almost the entirety of it and he has to be careful when he knocks not to knock them down. Twice, once and three times. It’s useless, really, but Steve does it just because. He hopes it soothes Max a bit like it does him.

There’s no response. No one invites him to enter, but he does anyway.

The room is messy, he scans over the papers, the toys; the duvets are all over the place, the window is open and a freezing lick of night air creates even more goosebumps on Steve’s skin.

Max is not there.

“Holy fuck,” he blows out. His feet are on the move before he can think about it and he has to jump and duck some of the other kids, where they stand, trying to peek what’s happening between him and the redhead. 

He hears the roar of his car’s engine seconds before launching himself on the door, opening it with two hands on the knob. He springs outside and follows the headlights where they’re disappearing along the driveway. He even touches the back of the BMW, but Max speeds up and he loses ground. He doesn’t stop running until the car completely disappears in the night.

Steve’s breath is heavy when the kids reach him where he’s bent with his hands on his knees, mouth open to take in more air. His hair all over the place.

“I’m so fucked.”

Then turns around and eyes each of them in the dull moonlight, “And so are you if I find out you knew.”

There are some protests, but Steve doesn’t address them, his eyes are on Eleven. 

She’s smirking.

Robin gets to the house half an hour later, her AMC Pacer rattles on the driveway so loudly, Steve cringes at the sound. 

When she gets out she’s sporting a feathered black skirt and a pink top. Her purple hair has been styled in a puffy tail and she has huge shocking rings at her hears. Steve would comment on it, if he wasn’t jackshit worried about the little Mayfield.

“You look beautiful, Robin,” compliments Dustin, but his words do nothing to take away the scowl she has on her face. 

She’s cross-armed and tipping her toe impatiently, “So? Are we going or what?”

Steve rushes the kids in the back of the car, where Will has to literally lie down on the other three’s knees, while Eleven sits in Steve’s lap, her stance rigid and her attitude the worst.

He smacks a kiss on Robin’s cheek while she maneuvers the wheel to bring them on the main road. She then flips him off and lectures him on being a better baby-sitter for “these little shits...no offense, kids.”

“It’s not his fault!” Dustin meddles, his voice will give Steve a permanent headache, he swears. “It’s all on Max, she stole his fucking car!”

“What the hell was she supposed to do? They’re bringing her brother back to life after months!” shoots back Lucas. His temper going off to defend his girlfriend and Steve would give him some shit about it, were they not following a thirteen year old driving his car in the night, headed to some secret governmental base.

“Not steal Steve’s car, for one!?” retorts Dustin, his lisp so evident now that he’s upset. “What she thinks she’s doing about guards and maximum security defenses anyway?”

Lucas hits him in in the ribs and they start a childish fight over nothing, poor Will has to retreat from their legs to sit solely on Mike’s lap.

“You don’t even have siblings, how would you know?”

“Fuck you, Lucas, it’s not like he’s her real brother!” Dustin shouts, he shuffles Sinclair by the shoulders. They look like a pair of scared rats and Steve drops his head on Eleven’s thin back to block out their voices.

“Idiots! Cut it off!” intervenes Robin. She brakes abruptly, turns around, her index pointed at the pair of friends. All of the passengers get shoved forward by the sudden halt and Steve has to put one of his arms around Eleven to prevent her from crashing somewhere. His eyes are wide on Robin lecturing the kids. She speaks about emergencies, the importance of sticking together and some other incoherent catchphrases Steve thinks she’s read on the back of her films’ covers at the arcade.

It works, though. Henderson and Sinclair shush their mouths and stay silent for the rest of the trip, while Robin nervously pushes down the gas pedal.

Steve figures it’s not the right moment to point out her blue eyeshadow has spread messily over her face making her look like a panda on LSD. So he remains quiet as well.

When they are in the exact centre of Hawkins, void of people even on a Saturday night, they all turn to Eleven, on Steve’s knees. She looks back with a stern vibe in her eyes and her mouth in a straight line.

“Jesus, Eleven, please,” pleads Robin, she touches the other girl’s arm but Eleven brushes her off and looks away, outside the window of the car.

“She’s in danger, El,” tries Steve, his shoulders are down, he has a sincere worried tone to his voice. He feels guilty, all of this is his fault. Can’t even keep an eye on the little ones while the adults deal with the heavy stuff. “We need to find her before she gets hurt.”

Eleven falters at Steve’s words, searches into his eyes for some kind of help. She’s torn between helping them and not telling on her friend, he can see that.

What does it for her, unsurprisingly, is Mike. “Show us the way? We’ll just make sure she’s okay. Right, Steve?” he addresses him, Steve cannot promise he will not actually kidnap the girl and take her back home. He also knows that Eleven will call out his bluff if he lies, so he just agrees on finding her first and then deciding what to do.

Mike and Eleven are holding hands over Steve’s shoulder when the girl starts muttering the first indications. “Second left and then go straight.”

Steve smiles at her, rests his head on the tensed seatbelt. He has to think about something else, all the distance between Max and Robin’s AMC is throwing him in a dark place of helplessness.

“Billy wants her there,” says Eleven out of the blue. In the car there has been silence for a few minutes, all of them were too taken away by the town leaving space to the wild forests of Indiana. Their hearts beating in sync as Robin’s fingers are tapping some melody on the steering wheel, nervously.

“What?” asks Mike, bends over to listen closely to what his girlfriend is saying. Every word spilling out of her mouth is gold to him.

“Billy,” she repeats, watching their faces, even Robin’s looking at her and Steve has to hit her shoulder and point at the street ahead to snap her out of it. “Last time he said her name. He will not like it if she’s not there. I know.”

Steve imagines for a moment what Hargrove looks like, right now, something he’s not done yet, probably as a self defense. Eleven has been feeling guilty around Max for the whole time, feeling the weight of Billy’s death on her shoulders. She’s been trying to reach him using her mind tricks since day one and not even Jim Hopper himself has succeeded in talking her out of it to take some well deserved rest. Max, eventually, forgave her, and Eleven has made a lot of progress ever since.

But he cannot understand fully, with made up images of Hargrove on a white bed, probably surrounded by beeping machines and wires, how all of this feels for Max. Just like Dustin, he’s an only child, but picturing his parents or even one of his friends in that state makes his guts churn.

Steve does not know how he could not fully grasp the gravity of what has happened to Max’s brother before. He needed her running away on his car to do so? He swears he thought he was a bit more empathetic than that.

Robin starts asking Eleven a trillion questions about the place she uses to meet up with Billy. They all listen carefully, the only thing interrupting her narrative are directions on which way to go.

She tells them it’s the dark place she always goes to, with the water on the floor. And she keeps repeating what she’s seen in Billy’s memories, on the beach with his mother a long time ago.

“What does he say?” questions Lucas, he’s haunched to see Eleven in the face. Will is probably squished somewhere in there, but he does not complain once. Sweet, little Will Byers.

Eleven looks away, she has a pained expression, she does not look like someone who wants to answer that.

The tension built up in the car releases when Dustin screams “There!” pointing at a tall building at the end of the road they’re on. There aren’t lights on, but Steve knows better than to think it’s empty.  
As an afterthought, he wonders what Eleven does not want to say about her encounters with Billy Hargrove, but he has to quickly focus when they also spot his BMW, parked at the side of the road, the engine still on.

He’s out in less than two seconds, gently pushes Eleven to her feet and runs at the driver’s seat, looking for the little girl. “Max!” he calls, when he finds it empty. “Max!”

The rest of the group waits for Robin to quickly park beside Steve’s car and then gets off in a rush, Will’s hair is pointing in every direction, his eyes are a little bit wider with excitement. “Steve! Don’t scream like that, they’ll spot us!” hisses Dustin when he jumps at his side and checks the interior of the abandoned car himself.

Steve turns off his car swiftly, then turns to the rest of them. “Does she have a walkie with her?” he asks, eyes as huge as Will’s but with worry.

Lucas shakes his head, “No, it was in the living room with ours.”

Good Lord, he should get some kind of monetary rewarding for watching these scamps.

“Okay,” (not really), “You stay here and I go search for her.”

His tone does not admit complaints, but he’s not surprised when they come. From all of them, Robin too.

Steve passes both hands through his quiff and interrupts their incoherent rants. “No one will be shot. I’d rather know you’re here, not playing with secret services’ patience. Now, please Robin keep an eye on them and adjust your damn eyeshadow because it’s terrifying.”

With that he smooshes Dustin’s hair where they stand out of his hat and turns back to the forest. 

He has to ignore the creepy feeling of being followed to just go on. He rationally knows there aren’t demigorgons or demidogs out there, but he starts sweating nonetheless, while he whispers Max’s name. 

He can’t see a thing, the moonlight breaches through the big branches of trees only every once in a while and it’s not enough to find someone so little who, on top of that, does not want to be found. Steve proceeds with his head low, knees slightly bent, pays attention to where he steps and hopes for the best. Pretty much as he always does. It’s brought him a good enough luck, so far.

“Max!” the word is starting to lose its meaning the more he says it to no one at all, but he continues.

When he arrives at the limit of the forest, in front of a steel gate, he checks for cameras, left and right and then starts running to the left, guessing any direction is as good as the other because he. Can’t. See. Her.

Suddenly, in the distance, he catches a glimpse of movement and speeds up. His legs are made to run, or so his coach at Hawkins High used to tell him. He’s pretty fast, anyway, so he gets where the girl is sneaking under the fence just in time to grab her by the ankle.

“Get off me!” she screeches, the sound similar to one of a trapped animal and Steve’s heart drops a bit, while he tightens his grasp, pulling at her leg gently, to bring her back on his side of the fence.

“Max, stop fighting. There’s no point. You won’t get in by any chance.”

Max starts kicking her legs, the metal of the enclosure sings with every hit; Steve prays no one’s at ear-reach. “Billy needs me!”

“You’ll go see him when they know it’s safe,” he grits out, the girl is stronger than expected and his arms are beginning to yield. “You’ll see him. I promise.”

Steve is not sure he’ll be able to maintain that either, but the situation is kind of desperate so he needs something. Anything. 

“Max, c’mon, come back home with us.”

Her legs stop moving. He breathes in some air, finding out he was holding his breath. Watches her surrender, start crying. She turns over and Steve lets her go. Her blue eyes are shining pools of tears and she’s covered in dirt.

Steve pats her legs, trying to comfort her, whispers “Let’s go home and sleep.”

He’s starting to go off about what they can pick up to eat on their way back when Max thrusts her body completely on the other side of the fence. Her eyes two lines from which tears still drop, down her face, the nose still running. But her expression is sharp now, while she gets up, looking at him.

Steve feels hopeless and plants himself against the metallic net. “You shouldn’t see that. He could be too confused to even recognize you, Max.”

She just shakes her head, whispers a “Sorry” before turning around and running off toward the building.

Steve drops his gaze to his once-white sneakers.

“Fuck it.”

He’s on government’s private property in the blink of an eye.  
~

That bip pierces his ears, Billy expects a rivulet of blood to come out of them, but it never happens and he’s left with his hands at both sides of his head. His hair is wet with sweat, plastered against his cold skin. 

The sound comes and goes. Back and forth. And every time it slaps Billy it’s with more force than the previous one. 

He looks around for Scrawny but cannot see her. He’s decided she’s a female. A little girl. It reminds him of something distant, comforts him in the slightest, most useless way. He’ll take what he can, though.

He’d call his mother, but does not do it out of dignity. He cannot let himself hope to see her again, it’s been years. 

Billy is tired.

He thinks all of these awful moments, where he suffers in this dark place inside his head could be overlapping. Or it could be one long eternity from which he will never recover, nor die for. 

Billy cannot grasp what was his life before the dark, but he senses something, on the tip of his tongue, he can’t quite name.

He must have seen the sun at least once. Once.

Max. 

He remembers her, and now she’s not with him, logically this should mean something, but Billy is too tired. He doesn’t care, maybe. The mechanic sound is growing stronger, Billy drops down on his knees and opens his mouth to scream. This time, the sound comes out of it, clear, strong.

Then, all of a sudden, the black becomes light and Billy’s eyes hurt to be opened.  
~

Hopper does not look extremely pleased by their presence. But Steve does not see surprise under his thick mustache, either. Maybe it’s a good sign.

“The kids’ puppet,” Jim grunts, his steps are like thunders on the white tiles and Steve decides that no, the lack of surprise is not a good sign. “Could have gotten shot like dogs.”

Max is walking by his side, she’s covered in mud and dirt from head to toe, but her eyes are so clear it’s scary. She looks more alive than ever under the blinding lights, while Steve squints his eyes, drags quickly his feet.

The soldiers spotted them in no time. Steve had reached Max and shielded her from the sudden light on them, maybe from a dozen of rifles pointed at their heads, too. He then had started screaming Hopper’s name like a prayer and the rest is History. A not particularly brilliant one, he has to admit, but Steve counts as a victory not having died with Max in his arms.

“Pathetic,” spits Jim. But his tone is a tired and affectionate one, dad-like. Steve lets himself relax, doesn’t take it personally.

Steve figures it’s the right time to tell him about Robin and the rest of the kids at the end of the road and Jim looks at him dead in the eye. Then he motions for a soldier nearby to ask him about some man named Robins, “Make sure he knows it’s Eleven and her friends,” he says slowly.

The man nods once, then steps away. Steve would be impressed by the leading skills of the Sheriff if the whole military atmosphere did not put him on edge. It reminds him of Russian elevators and drugs.

The hallway they’re going down is long and colorless like the rest of the building, from what Steve could see. It ends with a big double-door in dark green; Jim opens it by showing his badge to the little box on it’s side.

“From now on, you shut up and I speak.”

Both, him and Max, nod, they understand and accept. Thank you for not shooting us.

Max pats lightly Jim’s arm and he turns his attention to her, his eyes kind, warm for the kid. “Yeah?”

“El said Billy will want to see me. He told her,” she whispers in his ear, loud enough for Steve to hear from where he stands.

Jim looks back at him for a moment and sighs; puts a hand on Max’s shoulder to guide them further into the maze of corridors. Steve feels sick by the time they reach their final destination.

It’s a small room, packed with machines and a tall line of dark green lockers. Jim opens one of them and gets out a white isolation jumpsuit, with an helmet, there’s a yellow mask attached. He shoves it to Steve’s chest a little too strongly and Steve has to take a few steps back not to lose his balance.

Hopper grins at him.

“Wait here, guys, be right back,” he smiles at Max and leaves the room.

Steve straightens his arm up to look better at the jumpsuit in its entirety with an impressed expression. Makes a face at Max to diminish the overall tension in the room and let her know that he’s not mad at her.

The girl smiles big back, looking so much calmer now that she’s obtained what she wanted, apparently.

“Are you going to come with me?” she asks him, shy. She’s torturing the hem of her grey sweater, not looking at Steve.

“Of course, kiddo. Even if Hop barks at me,” he jokes, starts climbing in the big suit, clothes and shoes still on. He figures that’s how it’s done.

“Okay.”

Jim comes back with a smaller version of Steve’s suit for Max and they wait for her to put it on. She does it swiftly, with an ease that comes only from practice. Since the Chief is wearing one himself, they look like Russian matrioskas. The Area 51 version.

They follow Hopper outside and to another room, this one has a huge glass where one of the four walls should be. Inside, two other people in their same attire greet Jim. They look attentively at Steve and Max, one of them takes a menacing step toward them, but Jim stops him.

“Let me introduce you to Mr. Harrington, Kevin. He’s been a key member of our operation in the Russian base, he was the first one to get inside and beat their ass for two days straight.”

Steve does not try to correct Jim, since it was the other way around, but Kevin deflates a bit at that and Hopper has explicitly asked them to shut up.

“And this lovely lady is Maxine Mayfield, Hargrove’s step-sister,” Jim informs like it’s the most natural thing in the world to have a thirteen year old witness Billy coming back to the world of the alive. In fact, Kevin opens his mouth to protest, but Jim, which is bigger, plants a hand on his shoulder, the same way he does with Steve when he wants to make a point straight and not be bothered with whiny complaints. “She’s been coming here almost every day, with my daughter. More than any of you, anyway. Jane says it’s better to have her here.”

“It’s not—“ Kevin’s colleague tries to say, he’s wearing huge glasses under the mask, he looks more diplomatic than the other one, knows how to negotiate. 

Jim, anyway, cuts him off with a wave of his other hand, says “Are you trying to tell me you don’t trust my little Jane? Is that so?” and his tone sounds seriously wound, Steve is always so impressed by Chief Hopper. He dreams of being that assertive and respected, one day.

Kevin and the other scientist, both shake their heads and skim the two intruders one more time before turning back to the glass wall. Jim does not take his hand off the man’s shoulder, though.

Steve hears them hiss something under their breaths, he can catch some words from Jim. On me. Don’t bother. Just wake him. Steve draws Max to himself with an arm around her shoulders.

He feels stressed out. He’d thought he would have been on Byers’s couch by now, all of the shitheads sound asleep in Will’s room, all over the floor. He would go and check on them once or twice, just because sleep is not really his thing anymore. But this is something else.

The wall shines abruptly and Steve squeezes Max to his side, before she shouts “Billy!” rushing to the glass, she plasters herself on it and calling out his brother’s name. Jim shushes her, brings her back to where Steve is with a stern look. He does not need to say it, Steve knows they should keep quiet and behave, the Chief is risking a lot by letting them stay. 

On the other side of the glass, Steve can see what looks like an hospital room, sterile and oh so dull. There’s a thick blind plastic on both sides of the bed and an under-size inflatable pool pushed in a corner, its color so shiny under the lights. On the bed, as pale as Steve thinks a human can get, there’s Billy Hargrove.

Steve’s heart sinks in his chest at that sight. The boy is laced to the bed by the feet and the wrists. A big chunk of tubes, wires, starts from the middle of his abdomen and enters into several machines. He’s wearing a headband scattered with electric receptors and Steve can hear the solid bip his heart rate monitor is releasing.

Under the yellow plastic of his masks he looks at Billy’s, an oxygen one. The only thing peeking are his closed eyes and some of his dark blond curls, sticking to his skin like seaweed on a cliff. 

“Billy...” he hears Max repeat under the artificial sounds, but she does not try to run away from him again.

“All right, gentlemen, reduce Pentobarbital and Benzodiazepine,” cracks from a speaker.

Kevin starts pushing different buttons as his colleague pushes the red power button of a speaker himself. “William,” he says, the voice getting through the barrier and into Billy’s room with a metallic edge to it. Steve does not like any of this. Not at all.

He starts patting Max’s back and prepares himself to just bring her out of there, if things get too ugly.

“William,” repeats the man, Steve doubts he’s a doctor, might as well call him, the cashier of a Supermarket, to call out Billy’s name like a moron. “William.”

“It’s Billy,” grits out Max, her stance so much less combative now. “Call him Billy, he likes it better.”

Surprisingly, the man with the glasses listens to her and, in less than five minutes, each one of which drenched in suspense, Billy’s fingers start moving. Steve himself has to fight the urge to step forward to take a better look, his mouth is agape. He’s sweating like hell under the suit.

Billy’s hands, then, start trembling profusely. His arms, his legs, all of his body. Max calls out his name with a broken voice, her eyes must be so wet with tears and Steve thinks that everything is too unfair to the kid. To Billy. He talks before thinking twice about it, “Stop! You’re hurting him, Jesus!”

Hopper gives him the hardest of glances and points at him with an index. It means shut up. So Steve bites his tongue and does as he’s told, wishes he could reach under his mask to wipe away a traitor tear. He feels so overwhelmed. Consciously, if he had the time to ponder on it, he’d recall he’s seen worse happen to his loved ones, to his pack of children or fellow friends. He’s never cried for Barb, after all. He went to her parents’ house for dinner once a week only for Nancy, not to leave her alone in that situation. But that was it, Barbara Holland was never something that made him cry like a girl.

He guesses a lot of things have changed since then, though. 

Billy’s shaking like a fish out of water by now, looks possessed and Max hugs Steve’s chest tightly as she hides her head against his ribs. “Is this necessary, Kev? Give him a break, he’s rattling,” intervenes Jim. 

The man looks at the Chief like he’s going to tell him to fuck off, but then he leaves alone the buttons and all the lights he had going on turn off. Steve looks immediately at Billy, his body calming down, only the hands are still moving.

“Thanks.”

Kevin is not happy, he can tell. He scoffs and looks over at the other scientist. They are so impatient, maybe are planning on interrogating Billy until he’s unconscious again. Steve clenches his jaw to stop the insults building up from the area Max’s hugging. Haven’t they all suffered enough for two lives?

“Is everyone ready?” demands Glasses to the room, his eyes landing on Max and getting softer for a moment. Steve decides he likes him better than that Kevin guy. Glasses waits for Max to nod, she’s peeking from Steve’s jumpsuit, holds her breath. “Good. Dr. Clover?” he invites.

The chants of artificial “Billy?” starts again, as does the trembling, but it’s less bad than before and even Jim’s shoulders relax some.

The rattling of the bed gets broken by a suffocated scream. Billy’s eyes shot open.  
~

He straight out panics. The light is too much, he knows it does not like lights. It burns his skin, leaves marks for days, sore ones. Billy’s eyes water and close again, he tries breaking free from the constrictions, but they’re tight on his arms and legs.

“Billy,” keeps calling him a stranger’s voice. It may come from the other part of the black wall, but Billy doesn’t care, just wants for the white neons to be turned off. He screams again in the mask and shakes his head, trying to take it off.

“Billy, calm down. You are safe now, you are in an hospital and we will take care of you,” assures the voice. Billy has never trusted a soul in his life, he’s sure as hell not starting now. The hair plastered on his cheeks and neck makes him feel even hotter, a sensation so different from the cold black, but as excruciating. 

Billy, Billy, Billy.

He wishes they’d just stop and leave him alone. He’s drained out, wants to be left to die in peace. Is Scrawny there? Is she laughing at him? The up tenth call of his name reverberates in his ears, but something different about it makes him still.

“It’s me, Max. I’m here, you’re fine. Please, Billy, you’re fine now. Alive,” says the voice. And it does something to Billy, it breaks him even more. He stops, calms down, but only apparently. He wants to be good for Max, even though he’s not sure why. He moves his eyes in pain while trying to see through the dark wall, manages to take off his mask using a shoulder as leverage. “Keep it on, Billy.”

“The light...” he cracks out, too low maybe, his voice rasps in the place like it’s not meant to be there with him. “Turn the light off.”

In less than a second it’s dark again and his muscles relax, his breathing evens. It does not burn too much now. He’d call out for his step-sister, but he’s too out of it and does not even try to talk again. Not when he’s tied up like an animal. “You’re fine,” comes again from Max, but then “Right?”

Billy knows a few things. Not where he is, not what happened or who is watching him side by side with Maxine, but he surely knows that no, he’s not fine. Far from that. He’s about to shake his head but thinks better, if he’s going to feel this much pain, Max does not have to know. The bastards who did whatever to him do not need to know. Billy wonders if it knows and figures that that’s the case, embroiled in his head as it is. No escape.

So he nods once as he clenches his fists. The nausea kicks in shortly after, while the male voice starts telling him what will happen next. Billy zooms out of it, makes it the background noise he needs in order to fall asleep again.

Fuck them all.  
~ 

Joyce Byers does not call him to watch the kids again. For the whole week.

Steve catches glimpses of them when they stop by the Market on Wednesday, but they linger for so little Steve’s enthusiasm dies on his face. That same evening Robin scolds him for being such a “Whiney bitch” and reminds him that at least he hadn’t had to see Millicent Melroy make out with some jock for the whole evening, on Saturday. 

Steve does not care about Melroy or anything else, his brain is stuck on two more urgent things. The first one: Nancy is back. With Byers in her purse, but still. And the second thought Steve cannot metabolize has to do with Max’s arms around him as Billy’s extremely blue eyes open up. He has not told anyone about what he and the girl have seen in the ‘torture room’ days before, not even to Robin. It feels wrong, like spreading a friend’s embarrassing secret.

Robin eventually gives up on pulling out of his mouth more than two words at a time and he’s grateful for her once more. Her and her now orangish hair, curly and frizzy like something went wrong. “I was going for honey blond, you know? Something happened there, though. It’s whatever.”

It makes Steve laugh, he realizes it is the first time that week when he gets to his empty big house. That’s kind of pathetic. 

He makes the wise choice of getting smashed on a week night, all by himself, like a fucking retarded. Drinks himself to oblivion plundering his father’s alcohol stock. He feels seventeen all over again. Sit on the couch, some Looney Tunes on the telly and he starts singing one of his and Robin’s stupid lullabies. It talks about blood and blue eyes and turns out pretty dark.

Steve laughs it off with his arms around a bottle of white rum. Empty cans of beer are scattered on the coffee table and his mother would be so upset about it, seeing him like that, too. Probably. 

He stumbles to get his walkie talkie, starts calling for the kids as he presses random buttons. At some point Dustin answers with a sleepy voice and tells him to get the fuck to sleep already. Steve laughs, he talks about his hairspray routine, whispering it like it’s the dearest secret he has. Even watches around to check for prying ears.

Dustin disconnects at some point, but Steve is too deep into it as he follows Road Runner with wide eyes on the screen. “God, I want weed,” he chuckles and throws his head back, lets his mirth die with the cartoon’s credits.

That night, on the couch of his house, Steve dreams about Billy Hargrove for the first time. It’s messy and plotless, but leaves him sore inside. Blue eyes crying with wires all over.

On Saturday late morning, one week after the ‘Awakening’, as Mike and Dustin have referred to it, Steve stops by at the Wheelers’. He could drive there blindfolded, really, the hands on the steering wheel fall into the routine of going there and the trip goes by without Steve even noticing it. Once he parks the car in their driveway, just behind Ted Wheeler’s, he turns off the engine and starts panicking a little.

“Nancy,” he says as he looks straight in front of him, through the front window, “Hi.”

He’s such a fool, so anxious his palms are sweating where he pats them on his denim-clawed thighs. He starts again “Hey, Nanc—No no, I’ve never called her that once,” he slaps himself on the forehead and passes that same hand through his hair afterwards. Why is it so difficult for him? The answer is as clear as the October sun outside, but Steve tries to ignore it for a little longer. “Jesus.”

He snaps and collects his keys, “Fuck me.”

He’s about to knock on the door, he swears he’s not been there staring at it and not having the balls to move his hand. He’s thinking about being a ‘stealthy ninja’ half of the time he was there, when the main door was not even an option and Nancy used to wait for him with her window open, giggling. He’d get inside to find her perched over some book or homework or photo snapped by Jonathan, always looking like it was okay if he was there, but it would have been even if he was not. Now, the door opens without him asking and Nancy herself appears in front of him.

“Steve! Hey!” she greets him, warmly. She has a huge smile on her face and goes to hug him, asking how he is doing (if he lingers in it for too much he does not want to know). “We arrived on Thursday, had a lot of things to do, sorry for not saying hi earlier.”

Steve’s feet have probably some malfunctioning because they don’t look like they are going to move any time soon and he puts his hands in his jeans pockets to look less awkward than he feels. “Hey, no, don’t worry. I know, really.”

Nancy looks at him and goes, “Yeah,” before pulling the door closed behind her. Steve notices she has Jonathan’s camera at her neck and a stack of papers peeks out of her purse, yellow and white. She catches on immediately, putting them back in. “I’m following something for the Post, you know, they called us back in last week.”

Steve’s smile is as huge as honest. “Nancy! That’s great! You deserve it. You and Jonathan.”

She smiles back sheepishly, always so hard on the compliment side. Then looks behind Steve, repeating “Yeah. Thanks.”

“You going there?”

Nancy shakes her head and pulls at the string of the camera, caresses it like its presence soothes her, helps her thinking. That is something she probably never felt with Steve, anyway. “No, uhm, I’m going at someone’s house for the story.”

Damn, her changing eyes are so big and she stares right through Steve while talking in her jittery way. Her hair is longer than he remembers, he has to fight the urge to touch it. “Can I drive you?”

He hates his hopeful voice, but Nancy nods and it’s fine again.

She does not say anything about the call she’s received, only the address. He knows where he should go, it’s near his workplace and Hawkins is no metropolis anyway. They chat without effort, he asks her how was New York and she’s happy to give him a detailed rundown. He does not mind, even if her eyes sparkle a little, like she dreams of the City, going there with Jonathan. He likes her passionate talking too much to pay the sting in his chest any attention.

“We’re definitely going back next year, Jonathan’s thinking about college there. It’s a good one, prestigious,” she explains and Steve thinks that Nancy is the only one who can pull off big words like that without it looking forced. 

He wants to ask what is she planning on doing, but doesn’t. He’d like to pretend she’s never going to leave for a little longer and, also, they’ve arrived. “Here we are, number?”

Nancy looks at the wrinkled paper, “Eighteen.”

He stops in front of the right house, anonymous looking except for the deep blue color of the planks the front wall is made of. Steve gets out of the car, adjusts his grey jacket and pulls up the collar again. He’s a nerve-wreck in Nancy’s presence. Speaking of whom, she’s looking at him weirdly, embarrassed.

He falters in his steps, “Should I go? Sorry, I automatically—“

“No,” she stops him with a little smile, “It’s fine, I’m happy if you want to join me.”

Steve relaxes and nods, then follows her right into the blue house’s porch. If he looks stupid following his ex-girlfriend into work, nobody is there to judge him.

Nancy knocks and arches her eyebrows at him, he can see the excitement of something new in her puckered lips. Steve can’t help but admit that she’s made for this, investigating and understanding. These people have called her for a stolen bicycle, most likely, but she does not belittle any story; Steve loves that about her. That and other things.

A woman answers the door, she has on an apron and her hands are covered in flour. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Dayton?” Nancy asks, when the woman answers affirmatively she goes on to introduce them, “Good morning, Mrs., I’m Nancy Wheeler and this is Steve Harrington, we’re from the Hawkins Post.”

Mrs. Dayton catches up and greets them more warmly, as she invites them in. “Sorry for the mess, I’m baking cookies for my son’s school fair, but I have never learned how to use these new ovens properly.”

Nancy politely laughs at that with Steve following suit. He scans over the interior and his curiosity is getting bigger by the minute. The house is modest but well-kept; too many floral prints if you ask Steve, but it’s cozy and warm in contrast to the chilly October air. They sit down when the woman invites them to, Steve perches his elbows on the table while the other two talk.

“I’m glad you made it here so fast, figured it would take more time,” she confesses, while offering them some coffee gesturing to it. Steve accepts with a smile and a thanks that is probably the first and last word he will spill in that house. “Especially after the tragedy. I was so shocked to hear about Mr. Holloway and Mr. Lowe, it must have been horrible for all of you, guys.”

Steve tenses a bit under the yellowish light of the kitchen, but Nancy pulls it off better and comments on it just right, by saying they are still trying to process what happened, that doing their job as best as they can is the perfect way to commemorate their fellow journalists. 

The official story regarded a mass shooting, where almost twenty people had lost their lives. The Secret Services had came up with the big lie to cover up for all the victims of the Mind Flyer and nobody had questioned it. Murray Bauman had a lot of suggestions and the Government had rolled eyes but followed them religiously. Had Steve not known the truth, he would have believed everything.

“You’re right, sweetheart. So, should we start?”

The story Mrs. Dayton has is nothing like Steve expected. It is about her neighborhood’s weird behavior and Steve thinks about Murray once again when all he hears sounds like a conspiracy theory. The woman tells them about how, six families out of ten in that same portion of the road, go out to eat dinner on the same nights, at the same time and Steve takes a big gulp of coffee to avoid commenting on it with something like it’s normal.

The coffee sucks and Steve widens his eyes, but spits it back in the cup only when Mrs. Dayton rushes to her burning cookies in the oven. Nancy kicks him under the table but he shrugs with an helpless expression that makes her grin silently.

“Damn it— oh, sorry, guys,” the lady says, as she fans the smoke away from the pan. “Guess I’ll start over,” she sighs in a way that reminds Steve of his mom. It saddens him, but he gets up to help her handle the steaming object.

“What else do they do, Mrs.?” presses Nancy. She has a pencil stuck on the block notes and has not written anything yet. 

“Oh, uhm...they all turn off the lights at the same time.”

Steve’s head spins up, he touches a flaming hot part of the pan and hisses, but quickly recovers opening the cold water stream in the sink. “At the same time? As in, the same hour?” he investigates. 

Mrs. Dayton shakes her head, “No, honey. I mean that the whole street has their lights on and then—“ she snaps her batter covered fingers, sending it everywhere, “They’re gone.”

Nancy gets up from the table to side the woman, Steve can see the changes in her face, her square jaw is clenched, visible because of the ponytail she sports. “What else?” it’s a crescendo of her asking that.

Mrs. Dayton turns serious, “I feel it too, sometimes. I have to get out in the middle of the day, or I’m suddenly thirsty. Last week my Dave started crying out of the blue and I asked him what happened, but he didn’t know.”

Steve has the chills, he knows it’s not the water splashing on his hand. He looks at Nancy and finds her eyes already on him, serious as only one thing turns her.

They say their goodbyes and rush out like something other than the cookies was burning in that house. Mrs. Dayton guides them to the door with a creeped out look, she startles when they close vehemently Steve’s car’s doors and dart away on the main street.

Nancy is silent, so Steve speaks for both of them. “Is it that shit again?”

When there’s no response, Steve slams on the pedal, the car speeds in the middle of the town like an unhinged arrow. He starts humming something incoherent and out of tune under his breath. The sweat racing down the nape of his neck is not natural.

“Nancy! Is it?!” he snaps, looks at her and feels like a mad man. His nostrils flaring, a stripe of hair dangling in his sight.

“Y—yeah...it could,” she is not looking at him, stares at the road running under their wheels.

When Steve stops is in front of the Hawkins Post. He doesn’t turn off the engine as he can’t calm down his pulses. 

“We have to make sure, though,” she breaks the silence, “We can’t alarm everyone for nothing.”

Steve agrees, just a week before he’s sneaked into a secret governmental base and witnessed the Awakening, lost custody of his children and had the most miserable week of his life after the one following the Russian-gate. 

Steve looks her dead in the eye. He says “I’ll pick you up at nine.”

He then waits for her to get off the car and speeds away with no intention of spending the day at home.

Dustin contacts him through his walkie talkie, but he barely gets what he’s saying because of the shitty reception out in the fields. He hears “Quarry” and cuts off the communication, too upset to properly answer, make up some excuse. Dustin will understand. He hopes.

He’s smoking, sitting on his car hood in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. It’s a hill that looks a lot like the one they used to intercept Russian secret communications, over two months ago; for Steve it’s as far from a wood or a pumpkin field as he could get without leaving Hawkins.

His mind wanders to his parents. His mother has called him every night that week and Steve can sense she misses him by the pitch in her voice, he asks himself what it would be like leaving Indiana to join her in Europe. It would be much easier, maybe they don’t have monsters there, ones that spread mental illnesses and take lives.

When his cigarette is reduced to a burnt butt, he lights up another one, lets it dangle from his mouth and watches the valley in front of him. He feels his nailed bat rattle in his trunk as his hands tingle, ready to grab it.

Steve thinks that Europe would be okay, but the yellow grass staring back at him, half died, half fighting the cold, tells him he belongs to that land. He’s fought for it and he will not run away because there might be another hole in their goddam dimension.

He would like to go check on Max, see how she’s cooping with her brother’s fuck ups, but knows better than being all up Neil Hargrove’s ass. He’s heard bad enough stories from the girl and does not want to cause her or her mother any trouble. So he stays put and waits for the sun to set by listening to the radio and chewing on some chips he had left in the dashboard compartment. They’re disgusting. Steve finishes them in five minutes.

At half past seven he gets back on the road, calculating almost an hour before getting to the Wheelers’ house. He’d smoke some more but the pack lays, empty, by his feet and he’s left tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, while the radio blasts some Def Leppard. 

He’s drunk with nerves when he pulls up at Nancy’s. She’s already outside, of course, and gets on the car without talking.

“Your boyfriend’s not coming?”

It’s a little too harsh, but Nancy’s skin is tougher than anyone’s and she answers without flinching. “I want to be sure, first, it’d destroy him because of Will.”

Good, Steve feels like a total douche now and recovers by saying nothing at all for the rest of the drive. 

They get to Mrs. Dayton’s street in no time, the roads even emptier at night, especially in a residential area like that. Steve turns the car off and pushes against the headrest, an apology on the tip of his tongue because he’s weak like that for Nancy Wheeler. 

But she precedes him, as usual, without diverting her eyes from the lights coming from inside the houses, “Mike told me about Hargrove, that you were there too.”

He knows he was, but hearing it from her mouth throws him back to that unnerving night like it’s nothing. He just says “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry...about leaving so suddenly, letting you take care of everything. It was shitty of me and you have every right to hate me now. I know that being scared cannot be an excuse anymore, but I was. So much, Steve.”

“Hey, hey,” he rushes over with a hand to her chin to make her look at him. “I could never hate you, Nancy, you know that, right?”. As she nods he feels his heart relieve some of the pressure it was holding. “You’re the toughest one, no one’s as brave as you. I get it. Probably would have done the same if I wasn’t so scared of something happening when I’m not around, like I can avoid shit from the Upside Down from coming over and killing everyone.”

It’s half a joke, but it is too dark to steal a smile like he intended to. Sometimes Steve thinks that, among all the things the dark has taken from him, his lighthearted humor is one of them. At least, it doesn’t show as often anymore.

Nancy tsks and a corner of her mouth gets up, she’s trying to let his words weight less for both of them. “I’m not the one fighting that shit off with a baseball bat.”

Steve laughs at that and looks back at the dark road again. 

“I’ve missed you, Nanc,” he calls her that even though it’s weird; he can’t bother to care or look at her. “Don’t leave without saying goodbye next time.”

He hates sounding this fragile, a little bird in the storm, but it feels safe doing it in a car, alone with someone so important to him. Nancy squeezes his hand and interlocks their fingers. If Steve pretends in his mind that nothing has changed in the last year or so between them, it’s not important.

They wait in silence for almost an hour, then, listening to the radio on low and holding hands. It’s relaxing, Steve feels younger. Up until they see what Mrs. Dayton had described. Snap and the driveways fall into darkness as all the lights at the end of the street go out.

Breaths are held inside the car.

“This is some new shit, not sure we can fight it with a bat.”  
~

Billy stares at the food tray like it holds the answers to the world’s mysteries. Actually, it holds some kind of brown pudding and some mashed potatoes that make him feel even more sick. 

He’s sit in bed, alone for once and not in the mood for dinner. He grabs the plastic spoon and sends it against the black wall. He’s learned it’s a blind glass and he flips whoever is behind it maybe once or twice per hour.

He grins when the spoon falls to the ground, broken in half, and the microphone jerks awake. He feels powerful; it’s the only situation he can refer to himself as more than a piece of meat in the President’s basement, but it’s enough for the moment.

“Mr. Hargrove, please consider eating your food. Recovery will take less time if you put the right fuel in your body,” says some doctor he can’t see.

Billy hates his patronizing tone, the way he explains how food is important to someone’s functioning. Thank fuck, he knows. “So you and—the rest of the military can jerk off watching me putting it—in my mouth?” he snaps, the mean tone made ineffective by his feeble voice. It hurts to speak, he has to inhale deeply from the oxygen tubes going straight into his nose to recover.

“Mr. Hargrove,” it’s not so much of a warning as it is a plead and Billy likes it more. He still doesn’t eat.

“Yeah, that’s—that’s my name, say it louder.”

He rationally knows he needs to eat, but he also wants to get the fuck out of there and stop being followed to the bathroom by a stranger in a jumpsuit. There were two of them a few days ago, when he asked for a razor to shave off his remaining mullets; they ended up doing it for him because he had run out of breath like a little schoolgirl. 

They said it helped the wired-thing measuring whatever. He doesn’t care about hair, he wants to break free from there. 

“I’ll have to insist that you eat, Mr. Hargrove.”

Billy’s laugh is joyless and turns into a fit of coughs. He brushes his hands over the short hair he has left, uselessly tries to take a handful of it just to feel something. 

“Let me out first.”

There’s no answer from the doctor and Billy sinks down in the covers, feels too tired to topple the tray like he usually does. He closes his eyes before the soft light shows them watering to the motherfuckers watching attentively.

He sighs in the dark of his eyelids and feels his weak, thin body give in to sleep. Unconsciousness that, he hopes, will not bring more nightmares.  
~  
If someone, two years ago, told Steve he would have found himself at Hawkins Labs, on a Sunday night, with Jonathan Byers, Nancy Wheeler and Robin Buckley he would have probably punched them for not being funny in the slightest. But here he is now, nailed bat and everything, waiting for Byers to cut the numerous chains at the door with a pair of shears. 

The guy is all wobbly limbs and weird posture, but he’s learned not to make fun of him for every little thing he does. Except, maybe, dropping the shears for the hundredth time. “Back off, man,” he tells him and takes the tool from his shacking hands. The chain falls, lifeless, in less than thirty seconds. He has to swallow the victory grin threatening to appear on his face.

They’re here to figure things out, it’s not a race. But still, he’s probably ten times more athletic than Jonathan.

“Good boy, Steve, you have a future in robbery,” smirks Robin as she brushes past him and slaps his head. He’s not payed enough for this, honestly.

As the four of them enter the hall, a spooky sensation showers them into silence. Their flashlights create bright cones of light in the pitch black of the building. They all start pacing through the corridors, down the stairs where blood puddles have been washed away, down to the first electric door.

Jonathan uses the badge he’s nicked from his mother’s room and Steve thanks the nostalgic vein in Joyce when the red light turns green on them. “It would’ve sucked if it didn’t work, right?” jokes Robin. Her hair looks even more orange under the artificial light of Steve’s torch and he loves her but she has to shut the hell up.

Jonathan gets them through three more doors, then the elevator. The hallway that opens up in front of them has the black traces of otherworldly life all over, they look like a bunch of drawn black tentacles and Steve can see Nancy getting closer to Jonathan, his hand goes to her waist, protectively.

“All right, folks, what now?” questions Robin, who is the only one that does not get the creeps from that place, apparently. At least, she doesn’t show distress.

Steve takes off his backpack and lays it on the floor, he kneels to take out a headscarf, along with a pair of latex gloves. “Now, folks, I go in and find out if shit is about to hit the fan.”

Nancy takes a step forward to protest, but a touch from Jonathan quiets her and she just looks at Steve meaningfully. Stay safe. He nods once, then picks up the flashlight from the floor. In the other hand he holds his walkie. “Reach out if anything happens and I’ll come get you,” tells him Jonathan. Steve simply pats his back energetically and passes the badge on the sensor of the next door.

He’d be lying if he said he’s not on the verge of trembling from fear. He’s scared that whatever he will find will put them all in another spiral of terror he’s so not ready for.

He hopes the others won’t find anything either in the database and the archives. Some report of possible future cracking of the gate, a warning gone unseen on purpose. As he gets into the control room, he stomps on some squashy substance and almost screams from surprise, but quickly recollects himself when he spots a blue free stress ball. 

“C’mon, Harrington, man up some,” he pumps himself up, sounding too much like his old basketball coach. “Man up.”

He checks the dashboard with his torch but can’t find anything out of the ordinary, no lights going off or weird alarms in the background. He then moves on to inspect the area behind the glass, where the Hole from Hell once smiled devilishly with its ashes flying all around and that sound he can still hear coming from his twisted guts. He’d seen it only on tapes, but Chief Hopper had let himself go to excruciating detailed tales about it one night, when the alcohol level had been too high. Steve, on his part, knows well enough what underground galleries feel like around you.

The black vines are just marks on the concrete and there’s normal dust floating in the cone of light. On the wall, a hole that would’t fit an arm in depth, as black as the rest and as still. There’s nothing out there.

Surprisingly, it does little to settle Steve’s dread. He suspects it’s the post traumatic syndrome caging his heart and making his legs wobbly like Byers’s. The smell of death and pain is so strong it pierces through the headband he’s placed over his nose, his mouth.

Steve has to get out before he can’t find it in him to walk more and he opts to die on the floor, where many others already have.

It was like a fetus, son. It was the fucking gestation of everyone’s worst demons.

That’s what Jim had said, voice sloppy from one too many drinks and arms all over Steve’s kitchen counter. “Some proper Alien shit.”

It had made Steve quiver even then, when everything looked finished for good, but now, at the heart of all bad things, it paralyzes him. His walkie talkie buzzes to life and Steve snaps out of his dark thoughts. “Steve?” croaks Jonathan’s voice, when he does not pick up, Jonathan repeats, “Steve? Man? Is everything all right?”

No, he thinks, but what actually grits out is a “Yes,” that lacks credibility to his own hears. It’s whatever, though, he’s not trying to convince Jonathan of anything, it’s enough that they’re all still breathing for now.

He leaves the room without looking back and thinks about Will Byers getting goosebumps every time he sensed the Mind Flyer approaching. Steve knows he can’t have that sixth sense about the Upside Down, but that’s exactly how he feels. Even when they all get out in the night and trot back to Jonathan’s car, the air seems steeped with threats, the moon is nowhere to be seen.

“Could it be about the Commies again?” asks Robin from the backseat, she’s been scoffing since Steve re-joined them in the main hall. None of them has found anything useful. Luckily. Maybe. “I mean, they had their own customized gate, am I right?”

Steve does not answer and looks outside at the forest, interrupted only by a bunch pf cornfields, he can feel Nancy’s eyes piercing through his head and he’s thankful when she does not ask him anything, but answers Robin, “Plausible. They’re not on American territory anymore, though, the Secret Services have made sure of it.”

“And even if they were in the States, it’s unlikely they would choose Indiana of all places again, there’s no way they wouldn’t figure them out in a minute,” Jonathan ends the thought and it rubs off on Steve unpleasantly. He feels Robin’s fingertips on his neck next and decides to focus on that comforting touch.

“You guys sound like professional Ghostbusters and FBI agents had a baby,” deadpans Robin, he can tell by her tone that she’s bored to death. She then starts rumbling about that girl, Mary, who keeps visiting her at the arcade but does not play. Steve tunes her out as Nancy politely asks her questions about it. Robin just avoids getting into details on her sexuality, but all the other oddities are not left out of the story.

Steve falls asleep and, in retrospect, is the best thing to do because he doesn’t get to close his eyes when he’s home alone later.

He calls in sick on Monday and then again on Tuesday. Joyce covers for him; he feels a bit guilty, but not enough to do something about it. 

He paces through his house’s rooms like a ghost, bowl of cereals, the millionth, in one hand and a stained tracksuit on. The house is a mess, his stuff is thrown everywhere as an extension of his room. He finds a pair of socks under the fridge one morning, while trying to pick up the spoon he’s dropped.

It does not smell good either, fresh air can’t come in because all of his windows are shut. And he realizes the pool must be a carpet of wet, dead leafs because it’s been weeks since he last cleaned it. He thinks that it’s a good thing his parents agreed on stopping sending housemaids so damn often, they would be horrified at that sight.

Nancy calls, three times, but he cuts short. Dustin tries to reach out, too, through the phone, walkie talkie and even goes there physically to pull him out of his misery. But Steve is fine, he does not need anyone; lies to his parents when they call on Tuesday and says that he’s having a lot of fun getting ready for the Halloween break.

It saddens him that they don’t know him well enough to call out his lie, but it passes almost instantly.

He figures, one night, watching Love Boat’s old season, that it was just a matter of time before he had his physiological break-down. Before everything kicked in for real and he stopped bouncing around fighting demoniac dogs and humanoids like it’s some kind of sport. He darkly wishes it could never end, keeping him alert and out of his mind. Once in, he thinks the only way is digging deeper. 

Seeing the gate definitely closed shook him for this reason. He feels stupid and useless, a leftover for his parents and for the kids that soon will not need a chaperon.

He misses the painful throbbing of his veins, getting high on that. So much.

Bernie Koppell is saying something to Ursula Andress and Steve munches on his Cheerios so loudly, with his mouth open like a savage, that the words are completely lost on him. She’s still pretty and she is Steve’s dad’s favorite bond-girl. His dad has a thing for blondes, maybe that’s why it didn’t work out with his mediterranean mother, big black hair and olive skin. Yeah, maybe that’s one of the reasons in the long list.

He’d get smashed again, but does not feel like puking all night, it’s more laziness than self-preservation, really. Plus, he has to show up to work, eventually, and tomorrow is Wednesday, Robin will make him wait at the diner and it will feel like he’s grounded by her crazy hair, her weird cut off accent.

He turns up the volume of the telly when the clock’s pointing with both hands at number twelve and sinks even more in the cushions. Feels free to sing along silly tunes. He tells himself it makes him less vulnerable, as he forgets that even the nearest neighbors are a mile too far to hear him going crazy.

“Great work, son,” he tells himself in a deep voice, raising his thumb at his dad’s photo on the coffee table. “I’m proud of the man you’ve become. Wouldn’t want my only son doing anything but this on a work night before going into a shitty Supermarket where people know him by the wrong name.”

He’s bitter like that.

“Thanks, dad.”  
~

Days and nights are the exact same thing in that room, they’re marked only by food coming in and doctors talking to him. He stops asking what day it is the third time they answer and he feels like the numbers and the names have no meaning. He doesn’t care.

He eventually starts swallowing something more than plain water, but still flips off the people spying him as a lab rat. He figures it must be its fault, what it did to him and what he has done in turn, just to satisfy the hunger drilling somewhere else than his belly.

He’s refused to cry, the liquids in his body not enough to support the action anyway. But every time the lights are turned off and he has to sleep because that’s what you’re supposed to do in the total dark, his brain starts working at a thousand miles per minute. Going over and over all the faces he’s seen squirming in pain. Sees all of their deaths under his eyes when he goes to the bathroom and reeks everything he’s ever eaten there.

One day, or night, someone new enters the room. He does not recognize the man under the white onesie. He’s not so tall and he’s quite large, his white hair peeks from under the hood, plasters against the mask. He can’t see his mouth, but Billy knows he’s smiling by the way his eyes crinkle at the corners.

Billy wants to kick him in the face until he stops vomiting joy all over the place.

“Billy! It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he says cheerfully, his voice is muffled under the fabric of his mask. “I’m Doctor Owens and I will do your check ups from now on. Is it okay for you?”

Billy stares at him without answering, after a few instants of silence he rasps out a laugh and shrugs, “I don’t give a fuck—about who’s keeping track of when—I take a shit.”

He’s not trying to sound harsh, to bring up a fight for some dignity issue, it’s literally how he feels about the whole thing. Whatever.

Owens does not falter a second at that and his stupid eyes still crinkle when he chimes, “All right! May we start?”

Billy thinks this almost looks like a big fat joke, does not say anything else. Not even when the doctor starts asking stupid questions like how he’s feeling. “So, Billy, what do you remember from that night?” goes in heavy the man.

Billy shivers under his hospital robe and looks stubbornly in front of him. He’s not answering this. Even if he wanted to, what should he start telling him? About the night his mother left? Or maybe one of the many he’s been on the ground, aching too much to get up once Neil was done with him? Does Owens refer to the night in the basement, where no one could hear him call for help? Nobody came for him in the basements, surrounded by rats. Maybe Owens knew Heather and her family, all the other people trapped like him, now most probably dead. The last wild guess Billy can take has to do with StarCourt being the set of his death.

“Even small things, we don’t want you to tell more than what you feel comfortable.”

Billy is made of stone, does not move nor emits noise. The doctor’s voice gets lost in the air between the mask and Billy’s shaved head. 

He’s so deep in his pain he doesn’t notice when he’s left alone again. Lights turn off on his shaking body and he bites the duvet not to howl.

What do you remember, Billy?

Dr. Owens comes visit him once a day from then on. He sits backwards on a chair and talks to him, asks him questions with that carefree pinch and Billy ignores him without actively trying to. He reckons it’s his body gasping to keep his last bits sane.

Food tastes like shit and he’s always dizzy, can’t feel his feet half of the times. Does not turn on the television once when they bring it in on a cart. Billy does not need a consolation prize, fuck you very much. He stops biting back when they talk to him through the speakers and just lays down, waits for salvation or death. Either one. The fastest.

He thinks that enforced imprisonment is the cherry on top of his motherfucking existence.

After a week or so, when what he pukes is only green bile, yet another man comes in. He’s not wearing a jumpsuit or a mask and Billy, through heavy eyelids, recognizes him as Hawkins’ Sheriff.

“Christ, Owens. Is this a clinic or a concentration camp?” he barks as he scans Billy’s thin figure. He knows he looks as pale as the reeking sheets he’s living in.

He barely registers what the other man says, but his voice’s inclination is desolate, asks for help. “Jim?”

“Shut up, I’m thinking.”

“Maybe his sister could—“

“Hell no. She won’t get near him looking like a dead man. Not if I have a say in this,” he sounds lapidary. “Which I have.”

“He needs fresh air,” Owens admits, he likely knows a mistake when he meets one. 

The Chief of the Police presses his big warm hand on Billy’s cheek and the boy is too tired to retreat, closes his eyes and pretends it’s his mother hand even if it feels nothing like it. It’s been a long time since someone hasn’t touched him to hurt or to examine. It’s so unusual Billy almost chokes on a sob.

“He won’t stay here a minute longer.”

Billy sees Jim Hopper’s eyes planting his in a promise. “I don’t fucking care about contagion. Tell your paranoid nurses to fuck off,” he then storms out of the room and comes back with a glass of water and a bowl of soup. “Sit straight,” he orders and Billy’s body obeys as his brain is still trying to catch up. “Eat up.”

“Hop, can I have a word with you?”

“I’m busy right now,” Jim shoots back as he starts feeding Billy the soup. It hurts him to swallow, but the warm nestling in his belly after only four spoonfuls is worth the trouble. Hopper’s big mustache seems to shake out of nervousness, his hands are firm, though, as he mutters “Trying to hide this for two whole weeks. If Robins wasn’t such a crackhead I would still be blocked outside. Bloody idiots.”

“It wasn’t...personal,” Dr. Owens is cautious, weighs his words. “Billy has to be constantly monitored.”

“He will be,” Hopper states. Billy stares at the soup and pretends they’re not talking about him as if he wasn’t there. It is green with something brown that floats in it; still, he opens mechanically his mouth and welcomes the calories. He figures eating is okay when the Chief is fighting for him to have some more freedom than a chained up dog. “I’ll figure something out.”

Dr. Owens wants to say more, protest, but Jim’s posture does not admit comebacks. He’s putting the food in Billy’s mouth with a care that startles the boy, like he’s done this so many times he’s mastered the perfect rhythm and position. Billy can’t help but gaze in his eyes to find out what his intentions are, he does not do good with authority. Usually.

When Billy is done, halfway through the whole thing, Hopper hands the plastic bowl over to the doctor and Billy feels this is yet another disclosure of dominance. All of this has drained him out, though, so he closes his eyes, hoping for everyone to go away. He does not hypothesize Jim to come back, knows hoping stuff in his life does not bring him anywhere.

Billy’s head flies to his step-sister, has not heard her voice in weeks. Scrawny had said her name and a motion of hope had engulfed Billy, Max reminded him of life, solidarity in front of Neil’s violence. But he gets it if she doesn’t want to come back and see him. He was never a good enough person anyway.

He dreams about his mom, like he often does since he’s last seen her. But he shakes awake when shadows crawl at the corners of his vision. Heather screams somewhere in there and Billy cries on the rough pillow, silently.  
~

Steve’s doorbell rings when he’s at home on Wednesday.

He doesn’t feel like answering, show whoever it’s outside the mess he’s made of himself and his parents’ house. He stares at the ceiling in his room for long enough and waits for the visitor to walk away.

Only, they don’t, the trill never stops and Steve presses a pillow on his face to suffocate a shout. “Fuck’s sake,” he bites, then “Coming!” 

He takes his time on the stairs, caresses the wooden rail and kicks some take-out pizza boxes out of the way, watches them tumble on the steps. “Fuck’s sake,” he says again, his hair is greasy when he brings a hand to it to soothe the headache the piercing sound is causing him. Steve jolts the door open with an angry “What the hell?”

In front of him, Jim Hopper, Murray Bauman and Doctor Owens don’t seem impressed. 

He jumps a bit from surprise and stutters on something while the three man get inside, lead by Jim who does not wait for a formal invitation. Like, never. To do anything.

“Hop?” he asks, worried that something bad is happening. “Everything’s okay? The kids?”

Steve follows the Chief in his living room and then his kitchen, while the other two start wandering around, touching things, checking corners. Steve is baffled, do they know he and his friends took a trip to Hawkins Labs? Jim looks quite calm, though.

“Murray, what’s happening?” he goes on to ask the half bald man. He is picking a pair of boxers from under the couch with the point of his bull-pen, his mouth is a tight line. No answers on his part, either.

Jim kicks all the littering objects he finds on his path, his sheriff uniform makes him look so official Steve bites down on his tongue and waits. He can’t help but flush red when Dr. Owens, passing by, gives him a chastising look. He knows he’s an adult and they are not entitled to judge how he chooses to live, or better, survive, in his goddam home. Still, he starts picking things from the floor, pushing them in an overfilled black bag.

“Steve, when are your parents coming back home?” asks him Owens.

Steve jolts his head up and tries to watch him in the face from the other room while shrugging, “Christmas, most probably,” he stops, hands tight on the trash, “Why?”

He catches Jim and Murray exchanging a look, Murray nods, then pulls a face, all arched eyebrows and weird winks. Jim scoffs at that as he plops on a chair that Steve’s mom would define design while his dad some costly garbage. “Hop?” he says again, voice too high in his throat.

Murray’s hand lands on his shoulder and the man gets in his personal space with his trade mark conspirational look behind the drop-shaped glasses. “Do you love your Country, son?”

“God’s sake, Murray,” Jim slams his hat on the table, passes a hand through his thinning hair. “Always, with you, I swe—“

“Ok, ok, what. Is. Happening. Anyone?” Steve holds his hands up, the t-shirt he’s wearing rises up a bit at that. He must look mental for real, now. Meanwhile, Murray is arguing with Jim with his hand still on Steve’s shoulder. 

“He hasn’t answered! See? Are you even from the United States?” Murray sizes him up. “Your mother is Italian, does she hate capitalism, though?”

“How—“

“Murray, I’m warning you,” grits out Jim, he’s on his feet all of a sudden, ready to kill Bauman. 

Steve hates everyone in that house, including himself. After three days of loneliness this is a cold shower.

Dr. Owens comes to his rescue with a calming smile. Always had a better temper than everyone he knows, excruciatingly so sometimes. “How is your relationship with William Hargrove?” he simply asks, like none of this is weird at all and Murray’s hand is not squeezing with too much force for him to relax, even if he knows now it’s not about his burgling skills.

Steve is taken aback. “Uhm. He’s beaten my ass once, like, badly. And plays basketball like he’s on the ring,” he starts, gathering all his memories. But then adds, “He’s a good person, though, life has been definitely too hard on him.”

He feels stupid, complimenting Hargrove in front of three adult men who seem to find it really interesting. His lame rambling is not, trust him.

Owens seems satisfied with that, though, and even Bauman steps back, bites on an apple found in the fruit basket. Steve thinks it’s probably rotten but does not warn him. And Murray keeps eating. “How is he doing?”

“His conditions are precarious, he has catatonic episodes and—“ tries to explain the doctor, but Jim cuts his words off with an hurried wave of his hand. Steve is perplexed. He must not know, probably. He respects that but can’t help picturing skinny and pale Billy waking up screaming. Max’s arms around him.

“When will Max be allowed to see him? She’s probably miserable right now,” guilt stings in his ribs at his own words, Steve should know how the kid is doing. He’s taken it upon himself to be their protector. He knows they are not alone like he is, but he still needs to have someone to take care of like he’s been needing to be payed some attention all these years. Also, Max’s family in particular is not going to do a great job.

Jim sighs and nobody answers, Steve wants to break something but once again he stays still, clenches his fists on the kitchen counter. “How are you feeling, kid? Joyce’s been telling me to check on you,” that sounds almost like an apology, the best shot at it by Jim and his slumped shoulders.

Steve stares at the counter top, the only sound in the room is Murray’s chewing. Steve can’t tell them about what made it all go to pieces for him, about the black veins in the concrete and the dust in the air. To explain how he’s felt, then, would be pointless, because his audience is informed well enough. So he promises he’s fine while everyone pretends to believe it.

“Billy Hargrove needs a place to stay before we figure out the next steps.”

The way he just gets it out is so Jim-like, short and to the point, even when everything on him, including the mustache and beard, looks upset. Steve frowns bending his head some to try and understand, is Jim asking him to...?

“Am I the designated host?” he’s surprised his voice is so firm. Like the information does not make him lose balance. 

“Only if you want and can,” intervenes Owens, the scar peeking out from his shirt collar is of an ugly pink and white, Steve looks at it for longer than needed, listening. “Being closed in the clinic is deteriorating his psychological equilibrium even more. We’ve tried to give him enough stimulus and I have asked for a new arrangement, but the government has excluded his transfer to anywhere outside Indiana. The only other place, then, would have been—“

“Hawkins Labs,” Steve whispers, eyes still wide on the scar, he needs to blink but doesn’t.

“Precisely,” Owens says, he sounds nostalgic and Steve cannot wrap his head around it. How can someone miss the Devil’s hole? It’s beyond him. It almost makes him gag, but Owens continues and he focuses on the low tone of his words. “Now, the quarantine required by law is almost over, Billy will then be able to leave the clinic for pre-established periods of time. He will have to report to me and an equip of psychiatrists daily and won’t be able to leave the base.”

“How come Will Byers wasn’t locked down like some beast?” Steve can’t pinpoint the exact moment he got angry, but he is now. A lot. He wants to scream and punch Owens’ precious equip one by one. Their presumptuous asses, too, thinking they can decide of everyone on the planet’s destiny just because they have to understand shit that’s bigger than them, than anyone. They play with fire and observe while others deal with the severe burns.

“Steve,” Jim is warning him, perhaps, but it comes out too weak for him to mean it.

“Will Byers did not actively cause the death of seventeen people, he was not part of the wicked army of the Mind Flyer and, most certainly, did not try to end Jane’s life,” lists Murray from where he’s leaning against the wall, he’s crossed-armed and Steve can feel an anger similar to his in the tone he uses.

“He saved El,” grits Jim. The terror in his eyes well visible even if he tries to control himself, the pain Steve reads there makes him deflate a little. “I will owe him forever for that.”

They all stay quiet after, Murray bins the apple’s core and Steve’s brain runs after Owens’ speech. He has to admit that it resonates with him. Steve is alone in a big house, comfortable and far enough from the crowd’s eyes. He knows everything he needs to about the Upside Down and what Billy’s suffered. Even knew Billy before everything went to hell. Literally.

“For how long?”

Jim and Murray look surprised, Owens doesn’t when he answers “We have to make sure it’s completely out of his system and will never try to hurt anyone or himself.”

Steve smirks darkly at that. If Billy Hargrove hurts someone it’s because he has always solved things with violence, does not necessarily need to be possessed by a creature from another dimension. Plus, Steve thinks, looking down at his attire, nobody will stop him from self-destruction, he eventually will do what he wants with his life and Steve understands that on a deep level. For this reason he does not warn the three men. 

“The Secret Services will provide a twenty-four hour watch, if they ever agree to this,” Murray adds. 

“So, you haven’t actually asked them?” Steve is bewildered, sometimes thinks he is the most sane person among them all. Which is saying something.

“I’m dealing with it personally,” says Owens, “But chances are it won’t be feasible. It’s taking too much of a risk.”

“You’d be at risk too, Steve, do you fully understand that?” Jim makes sure.

He considers, for some instants, taps his fingers. “Who hasn’t since the damn Gate opened, Hop?”

“He could try to escape,” offers Murray. “During the night, most probably. You’ll have to lock him up, to stop him. With whatever means, you get this too?” 

Steve feels uneasy at the thought of imprisoning Hargrove, but he understands where they are coming from and nods slowly, looking Murray straight in the eyes, he wants to convince them he can help, if they need him to.

He shakes off the voice in his head, which is asking who is he doing this for. Is he egoistic enough to accept something as big as becoming the keeper of a troubled subject because he needs to feel the thrills of action again? At least for a little while? He’s a void shell in a dull life and craves for a purpose.

Like he’d craved for the gate to be open.

Nausea hits him, stronger, he practically swallows the reflux of too much cereal, listens distractedly to Owens going over the procedures he has to undertake to get a permission. 

“You will receive daily visits of psychiatrists and soldiers. I may come here more often than you’d like, Steve,” Owens speaks slowly, repeats himself, articulates his name to ground him. Steve’s probably made it to the list of his patients by now, the mess in the house not helping. He nods again, doesn’t trust his voice. He could say something stupid that would blow everything up, make them realize he’s just a mentally unstable lonely boy.

“If you want out, you call me and tell me,” Jim points at him with a big hairy index, looks him in the eyes for longer than necessary, testing Steve’s willingness to complicate his life to the next level.

“Yeah. Yeah, ok,” he stutters, needs to sit down but stands straighter than before, puffs his chest and even grins a bit. He’s good at that. Then, because it’s become one of his priorities and he’s not even ashamed: “Can Max come visit from time to time?”

“It’s not—“ starts Murray, for the first time looking down.

“We will do anything in our power to make it happen,” concedes the doctor. It feels like a sweetener for Mental Steve, but it’s enough for now.

“Ok, I’ll do it then.”

From then on is a whirlwind of information, recommendations and them telling him he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want. Weirdly enough, every time they tell him that, he wants to do it more. They reckon they will figure something out for Christmas, when Steve’s family comes back from wherever they are now. Steve finds himself not caring about what they could think of him giving shelter to a poor-looking guy with some rage issues.

When the three step out of his house and he closes the door behind them, Steve leans on the door for a few minutes. He then starts cleaning up the mess he’s made of the house, of himself.

That night Robin stops by, she has a take-away bag from the diner and a cautious smile. He greets her with a tight hug, laughs when she winces out her disappointment in his smell. 

Robin’s hair are black now, lighter at the roots, and Steve distantly realizes Halloween is approaching, but he wouldn’t know when exactly it’ll be. 

They eat dinner on Steve’s tidier couch, talk about what’s new at the arcade, the kids passing by to see if Steve has shown up, them going away with sad faces. He asks about Mary because he doesn’t want to think and Robin talks for a while about how she has not come to the shop all week; then goes on narrating the plot of her new favorite movie, something with Night in the title and a lot of vampires.

He looks at Robin and thinks back at when he’d misunderstood their chemistry for something else, realizes they wouldn’t work even if her preferences gravitated around men. He’s starting to consider her like a sister, right beside his little brother Dustin and family is what he needs in times like this.

Chit chatting is easy, it feels comfortable. Steve does not tell her about Billy Hargrove, knows better than putting that weight on her shoulders and worry her. He also knows that the less people involved, the better.

How do you say, in Italian, some things are better left unsaid?

Murray had had a point.  
~

Billy is counting the tiles on the bathroom wall when a loud knock reminds him that his alone time is limited and he needs to hurry the fuck up. He didn’t need to go, in the first place, but he had felt the need to walk somewhere so, until he figures out how to elude security, he has to take what he can.

He looks in the mirror, a pale version of himself smirks back. 

Billy’s head is a mined field, sometimes it closes down, for hours on end. In other, he’s a bundle of energy, ready to explode. He bites back at the hands trying to soothe his pain because he knows all the doctors in that shithole wouldn’t mind him dying if it meant they could poke around his rotten brain. He has even tried punching one of Owens’ lackeys straight in the nose when he’d asked about his nightmares, but missed grossly.

They had him tied to the bed after that and this is his first bathroom trip where no one checks out his dick. Billy has even joked about it, in that mean and dark way that unsettles even the soldiers, where they look at him like he’s going to take a bite out of them and leave the rest of the body for it to take.

He understands their fear, it’s the same that cages him in the middle of his sleep; Billy can see it combust in the grey of his eyes, the color not quite his, like every part of his body. When he gets caught in the memories, he has no way out, either he starts throwing a fit or he falls in it. But neither is a solution. Billy knows it’s too late for such thing.

Another loud knock and he drops his head in between his shoulders, everything aches. He blinks at the white sink, turns on the tap to watch as the water falls down the drain. Remembers how Heather had done the same, a million times in his head. In the iced tub too. 

It also throws him back to the showers at the pool, the way his own body tried to strangle him, poisoned with black. Smelling of death. The most disgusting creature growing inside of him, the worst of cancers.

Billy looks at his elbow, holds it up in front of the mirror and remembers the sun roasting it like a piece of beef on the grill. The freezing cold of night felt like home, like California once felt. He glazes over the bone there, just a little scar breaking through the skin, but so thin nobody would notice.

The lights flicker and Billy can swear it is there. It moves along the water pipes, the air ducts, Billy inhales it in the humidity of the room, gives it life with every pulse in his arteries. It’s everywhere.

“Get out!” shouts the prick in the jumpsuit, the doorknob shakes under his anxiety. Billy thinks about killing himself on his watch just to have a laugh, but continues watching the stream disappear in the sink, focuses on the sound. He’d take his life in this exact moment, no regrets, he could fill the sink to the rim and dive his stubbled head in there, wait until it fills his lungs.

Billy looks at his reflection again, though, thinks about the blue his eyes once held, bright as Max’s. A lot of people used to think they were actual siblings, “It’s the fierce temper,” had once said Susan. He’d secretly put it in a box in his mind not to forget it along the way, tasted like belonging. He’d never told Max all of this, but now he chooses to postpone his departure some more, he wants to say his goodbyes.

When he opens the door, he finds the soldier ready to kick it open, stops right in time not to hit Billy, who has not even flinched at the sight. Maybe wanting to feel something. Wanting for it to receive a foot in the stomach. 

“If you’re that eager to—see my cock you should ask more nicely, man.”

Dr. Owens comes back on Friday, at least he thinks it’s Friday, would not bet on it, though.

“Billy!” his voice is too cheerful, as always. “How are we doing today?”

Billy swears the man has to leave him alone. They’ve been seeing each other every fucking second, it feels like the doctor lives up his ass and comes out to piss him off even more. 

This time, though, something has changed. Billy can see the entirety of his round face, the salt and pepper of his thin beard and all of the white hair. He’s not wearing the rest of the suit, either, just an ordinary white scrub with his name printed on it.

He must look confused, because Owens provides him with an explanation right away, always wanting to be so transparent with Billy, like he cares. Billy knows better, but hears him out anyway. “Your quarantine ends tomorrow night, I’m speeding up the whole process. Those jumpsuits are stupidly uncomfortable.”

Billy bites back a whipped retort. His quarantine is over? Does this mean something else than being able to see all of these douchebags’ faces? Billy decides that no, it doesn’t.

“Billy,” the doctor draws his attention by whispering his name and sitting nearer than usual. Billy, despite himself, listens again. “I’m working to get you out of here.”

Billy thinks the old man wants his fucking gratitude, but all he gets is a blank stare. It’s one of those moments when he’d rather not take another breath, what’s the difference anyway?

Dr. Owens sighs, cracks his neck and looks over at the dark wall. Asks for everyone behind it to leave. Billy’s intrigued now, he can’t give two fucks about anything, but a little entertainment from the doctor feels like a good diversion for once. He’s also curious to see how far the idiot will take it to gain Billy’s trust. Billy silently considers that he can’t, so he might as well take the most of the fun the man can offer.

They wait in silence a couple of minutes, then Owens sighs and stand up. He takes off his scrub and Billy’s definitely not guessing where all of this is going. Considers how he could do in a fight with the overweight man, if he’d place some hits before loosing all the strength. But Owens proceeds to take off his tie and unbutton his shirt.

“What the—fuck, Doc?” Billy thinks it’s not a fight what the man is searching for. Splendid, just fucking awesome. 

Owens never unbuttons his pants, though, just raises the white vest up over his abdomen and looks at Billy’s face. Billy doesn’t look back, too absorbed by the doctor’s skin there.

There are patches of hair, sporadic and grey. They move timidly among huge portions of red, scarred tissues of skin. There are some indents on the right side, whole chunks of the man’s belly lacking like something sawed them away. Littered there, some bandages that look so sore Billy feels it on hisself. Jesus, he thinks, but stays silent.

Not out of respect or for lack of balls, just because he’s considering. Wants to know what Owens will tell him, unprompted. 

Finally, the man speaks, and he does it with a deep voice, for once void of the joy he so annoyingly always puts on display. “I was attacked. Last year, at Hawkins Labs.”

Billy knows it’s not all, that he’ll say something else, but has to ask, “By what?”

At that, Owens pulls the vest back down and drops on his chair. He suddenly looks much older and the wrinkles at his eyes are made of distress. “Its animals,” he just says. 

Billy does not have to ask whose animals Owens is referring to. He’s been in its head, as the same thing was happening the other way around; he knows what they’re talking about. Chills run down his back and his limbs, his jaw clenches and unclenches, he need something to grip onto but has nothing apart from the bed’s bars.

“Why?” he’s uncertain, thinks he doesn’t want to know as he speaks.

Owens’ eyes are lost somewhere over Billy’s head, he’s seeing something in the thin air. “We tried to outsmart it. We were stuck in the Labs and someone had to make sure they all would get out safely,” he does not explain who this we are and Billy doesn’t interrupt, he’s biting the inside of his cheek so hard he starts tasting irony blood. “Bob Newby went to the control room to open the doors for them and I stayed behind, checking the dogs’ movements through the security cameras.”

Billy nods, he communicates he’s listening, like he needs Owens to know this is important to him as well. He’s captured, can see what the doctor is saying unroll in front of him, breath hard to take in.

“Bob died, one of those things attacked him in front of Joyce Byers.”

Billy knows the name, thinks about the weird looking guy strolling around school with a camera dangling from his neck, his eyes small and an outdated haircut to complete the work. Billy thinks he’s heard Tommy H. make fun of him once or twice, but that was it. “Harrington has let that faggot Byers steal his bitch” was Tommy’s favorite piece of information. It was after one of those comments that Billy had gone to basketball practice and had tried to trigger King Steve with physical fouls at first and smart words after, in the showers. Harrington had not given him the satisfaction of getting properly pissed off and Billy had ended up with balled up energy he didn’t know how to blow off. Daisy Whiterspoon had been in the right place at the right time.

“I then tried to get out, but one of them smelled me and found me,” Owens could be shaking, for all Billy knows, or maybe the bed is the one moving, an earthquake could not tear Billy’s eyes away. “I managed to get on the staircase, afterwards. I was bleeding and I sat there waiting for it to finish me, you know?” 

Billy does.

“It never came, the final bite. I still don’t know what happened and probably will never find out. Jim found me there after a while.”

“Where did they go?” Billy is aware of his voice breaking on the last word. His eyes are dry from him keeping them that wide, the suffused lights hurting them nonetheless.

“They eventually went back from where they came from, through the gate. The girl managed to close it and we thought that was the end of the problem,” the doctor explains, his smile is back, even if just on the verge of wistful.

Billy frowns. The gate? The girl? It’s the first time he hears these words, and he can’t recall anything sounding like them prior to this moment. He decides to ask, knowing the aching in his bones will not die anyway.

“It’s a long story, Billy. One that you will hear about when it’s the right time. I promise you will know everything. For now, though, suffice to say the things that happened to me, to us, are otherworldly and we’re still trying to figure them out. We hope nothing like that will happen again, but I can’t lie and say we are positive it won’t,” his hand moves, perhaps he wants to touch Billy’s arm, but a slight flinch from the boy makes him reposition his fingers on the chair’s backrest. “Trust me when I say we are doing everything in our power to stop it.”

Billy doesn’t do trust. Never has. Maybe before his mother left he had known how to believe in people’s words, but now, looking back, he doesn’t even recognize himself at that age. He stays quiet and Owens sighs, knowingly moves his head.

“All right, Billy, we should get on with our tests, now, are you okay with it?”

He doesn’t want to be touched, feels like screaming when Owens does it because he’s agreed to it by pulling his arms from under the blankets. The doctor talks about Halloween and some other light shit that he probably thinks will help Billy not going nuts. It does, in some way, the calm spilling of Owens’ voice in the room helps him.

When he’s leaving, his tie in his hands because he’s not put it back on, Owens says some of the words Billy has to erase shortly after because they’re just too difficult to bare.

“Whatever we discover, whatever we understand about all of this, it’s important you keep in mind that it was never your fault. None of it was, Billy.”  
~

Steve tells the kids to meet him at the arcade that evening, through walkie talkie. 

He waits for them with some snacks he’s sneaked from the backroom of the Supermarket, hopes is a good enough apology offer for all of them. Robin looks at him like he’s the most pathetic creature ever invented. “Will you bow for them, too?”

Steve flips her off and throws her a Milky Way to keep her occupied. She looks even more extravagant than usual, Keith has made her wear a quite revealing costume that should make her look like a sexy cat-girl or something but really confers her a grumpy black creature that has been disturbed in the middle of a nap vibe. Steve is sure she’s cold too, the dress is sleeveless and the skirt too short. A huge change from Robin’s everyday casual attire, even at work, all covered up because she feels girly only at parties and when she’s really drunk. Which happen at the same time, frequently.

Steve waits for his little friends sat on the counter, his sneakers hang a few feet from the ground. He eats pop-corns nervously, the only thing cheering him up is the frequent passage of Greasy Keith squeezed in a dog costume which is all kinds of gross and extremely hilarious to Steve. 

“God’s sake, Steve, they’ll come!” snaps Grumpy Cat behind him, he hums while not drawing his gaze away from the shop door. Every time someone comes in, he tenses and stops eating, making Robin scoff ever more. “And stop fucking getting crumbs all over my desk!”

Steve giggles, a distant memory of the two of them on a public restroom’s floor singing like a muppet, or Tammy Thompson. But he pays attention not to make a mess of the place from that on, still waiting for his friends.

Through the glass windows he can see Byers’s LTD Ford pull over and the pack of kids storming out of it. Eleven and Max aren’t there. Steve tenses, ready for the boys to call him out for being a prick and not answering their calls.

Instead, what Steve gets is a bunch of hugs and Henderson’s special handshake, to which Robin snorts and turns around. “Steve! We’ve missed you so much, man!”

The rest of them nods and starts sharing the snacks Steve offers them with a big smile. Dustin briefs him on what has happened during his absence, at school, at Mike’s and with Suzie. The others finish his sentences and they bicker a lot, to the point where Steve has to change the focus of their attention to the game machines, even gives them all the coins he has. In less than two seconds they are everywhere, shouting at the screens and competing with each other. 

Steve’s heart is warm again, his axis is centered and even joins them for some time. He obviously loses every time he plays, but the children taking the piss are music to his ears.

He subtly feels stupid for having avoided all of that for a week, he should keep in mind that they love him just as much and it’s not fair to them keeping apart. 

“Steve!” hisses Robin at some point, he’s surprisingly ahead of Lucas in a car video-game and grunts at Robin. “Mary’s here!”

At that, and when Sinclair’s car, a flickering grey dot, really, surpasses him, Steve turns around. Catches the girl in his sight as Robin elbows him like a moron, half hidden behind the machine Steve and Lucas are at.

Steve thinks Robin hasn’t got the best taste in girls; this Mary is ordinary looking, common height and physique, she’s dressed in a plain pair of jeans and a sweater of some baseball team Steve doesn’t know. Looking more attentively, though, he notices her straight nose and a green pair of eyes, just like Tammy’s and Millicent’s, figures that should have done it for his friend and smirks. “Go talk to her.”

Robin looks disgusted at that, even pulls away from him like he’s said the most horrible thing about one of her relatives. “Jesus, no.”

Steve rolls his eyes, “How come you were all hyped over Millicent’s brother’s party and refuse to even say hi to a customer, now? Rob, you’re kind of a disappointment.”

His friend is not listening to him, she follows Mary’s steps into the arcade like a sniper, one that has no intention of shooting. The girl’s blond locks follow her head’s movements while she looks around for something, or better, someone.

“See? She’s looking for you,” Steve points out. “You already know her name too, so you’ve talked once at least.”

“Of course I have, genius. I wasn’t into her at the time,” she whispers right into his ear as Lucas watches them curiously. Steve high fives him and congratulates for his victory, while Robin lists all the cons of showing interest to the “stunning Mary”. 

Steve sighs, he’s kind of bored by all this Mary-talking, wants to do something about it. Robin catches up on him approaching Mary when it’s too late and trying to stop him would mean being seen. 

“Hello, my name is Steve,” he offers the girl a hand, but retreats it when she startles, surprised. “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

The thing with Steve and girls is that he’s gotten worse and worse at chatting them up the better he’s become at fighting demoshits. Not for lack of trying, as Robin could testify. It’s as if he’s lost a great deal of his charm, beaten away by his nailed bat. The insecurity spreading through him after Nancy’s flop is still sore and the main focus of his drunk conversations with Robin. Sometimes Dustin, too. Pathetic, right?

As the girl doesn’t help the conversation flowing, he tries again, “And you are? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around Hawkins.”

“M-Mary,” she only says, voice small. She’s looking Steve up and down, seizing him up, even eyes the door. 

Wow, this is a new level of disastrous, even for Steve. He puckers his lips and passes a hand through his hair, the goal is to look confident, the outcome gets him looking fidgety. 

“Uhm, are you looking for someone?”

Mary takes a step back and shakes her golden curls quickly. She’s guarded and it makes him feel dirty, bad, like he’s done something wrong when, logically, he knows he hasn’t. All of a sudden, a new sensation generates inside him. The feeling of being vulnerable, exposed, weak even. 

He takes a step back too, brings a hand to his chest, massages it under the pullover he has on. He feels so hot, wants to get away. Something is threatening him, he knows.

“Steve! Stop bothering my clients!” comes Robin’s voice from behind. She appears next to him and slaps his back subtly. “I’m sorry, Mary, he has social dysfunctions, don’t trust anything he’s told you.”

The girl turns to Robin and, like it arrived, the feeling of being trapped in something bigger than him stops. Steve is left empty, confused, does not hear what Mary says back, but catches her eyeing him again, less frightened, just on the verge of cautious.  
Steve’s ears buzz with blood, the panic he feels is the aftermath of the mental breakdown he’s experienced five seconds prior.

Robin asks Mary a couple more things, Steve simply looks at her, he still feels like he doesn’t want to be there, but has always been more meddling than wary. Observes as Mary’s green eyes wander over Robin’s showing skin, halt at her arm, the left one, and shoot back up at her face.

Both him and Robin remain there, in the middle of the arcade, side by side as Mary runs out. The panic he’s felt apparently following her like an aura. 

“Please remind me, why do I only like freaks?”

When Jonathan comes to pick the kids up, Steve is already outside, on his way to finish his second cigarette, pushed against the arcade’s outfacing wall with a knee bent for more stability.

He watches the smoke swirl in the cold air, the smell of rain heavy around him, in the twilight. Steve takes a look at his watch and figures Jonathan is some minutes early, so he stomps on the butt of his smoke and gets over to the car.

“Jon,” he waves once, resting his forearms on the open-window frame.

“Steve. Hi,” Jonathan is always a bit twitchy in his presence, reminiscences of Steve being a solid dick to Nancy and to him, to the point of breaking each other’s faces. Steve has never apologized, but now is not the right time. The sore spot named Nancy in the middle of his pride pleads him to postpone some more, as if a year is not quite enough. “How’re you doing?”

Steve shrugs, knows Jonathan knows about his little break-down. The kids are not programmed to keep minor secrets like that, something among the lines of friends don’t lie. Byers has certainly also noticed his mother heading off to work more often than usual. “You?”

“Yes, fine. Uhm, thanks.”

Steve, as out of place as he feels, likes it. At least it’s normal, them arguing over a girl, fighting like idiots and then walking on eggshells every time it’s just the two of them. It untangles Steve nerves from the strange encounter with Mary.

“Hey, do you know why El and Max did not come?” he asks, wants to get in the car because it always feels too reckless saying the kid’s name in the streets, even if no one is around. He remains outside.

Jonathan has a pinched expression now, looks at his hands on the steering wheel. He’s always considering the fastest way to get away from Steve. “Hop and Max’s father didn’t give them permission to.”

Steve nods like it is fine, when the mention of Billy’s dad makes him shift his weight from one foot to another, where Jonathan can’t see it. 

Byers looks at Steve’s arms, to avoid direct contact, but Steve can tell he’s making an effort. He wants to say something, is about to, when Dustin jumps on Steve’s back and it all becomes a mess. “Henderson, you elephant, get off of me!”

And whatever Jonathan had wanted to say takes the road with him when he leaves.

Steve does not sleep that night, his mind keeps bringing him back to the deep uneasiness he had felt at the arcade. The disappointment shortly after. Asks the ceiling what it could possibly mean and decides it must be linked to his recent close-in. Probably to Billy Hargrove, too. 

Murray Bauman is a good man. He is. He feels deeply about people, their fears, sorrows, desires. The man reads you like an open book and spits back in your face whatever information he needs you to get, right when you need it. 

But he is completely tactless when it comes to delivering news. 

He enters the Supermarket in a rain coat and sunglasses, that is clearly the best example of an oxymoron for Steve who was pretty good at English. Murray flashes him en enigmatic smile and points to the backroom.

Steve sighs deeply and stays still for a moment, the magazine he was reading open on some celebrity’s drama he could not bring himself to care about. His face, as he follows Murray is as unimpressed as one’s face can be. A lot.

“Murray.”

“Shush!” the man presses his index against his lips, eyebrows high over the glasses. “There are cameras here, there could be mics too.”

Steve gets that he’s lived alone for a long time, in his security fortress. The only company, there, was himself and espionage stories. Jim Hopper when he let himself be bothered to receive Murray at his office.

“Why are you here?” Steve asks, sighing and leaning against a shelf full of toilet paper. 

Murray takes off his sunglasses and leans in, whispers “Because.”

Steve is already so done with him, honestly. “I have to be at the cash, can it be quick?”

Murray has never stopped by at the shop, rarely shows himself around town, so Steve knows something is up. Still, his attitude leaning toward ridiculousness tires whoever has to deal with him and Steve is part of that ‘whoever’. 

“Call me Bald Eagle,” Murray requires.

Steve wants to walk away, badly, but doesn’t. He snuffles and crosses his arms over his chest. “Can you fucking talk,” stops for a second, then concedes dropping his hands, “Bald Eagle?”

The smugness on Murray’s face is something else, Steve shakes his head, waits. “Now we’re talking. So, he did it.”

“Who did what?” Steve’s eyebrows are furrowed.

“You’re a really thick boy, you know that?” Murray grabs him by the shoulders as someone calls ‘George!’ from the shop. “He can fly freely, for now. He will get in touch, expect his arrival when the sun shines in the day and it sets.”

Steve’s mouth agape, he couldn’t describe how much he has not understood shit. He grabs the pen he keeps in the breast-pocket of his uniform and shoves it against Murray’s chest, along with a toilet paper roll. “Write,” he orders and gets out of the backroom to do is fucking job.

When the old man he’s served limps away, after he’s asked him how are his parents and he’s said a bunch of lies straight to his face because he actually does not know that, Murray reappears and pushes a piece of soft paper in his hand. He then puts on his sunglasses again and walks to the door.

Steve makes a point of shouting “Bye, Murray” at the top of his lungs. His smile is big when he sees the man run away, panicked. Priceless. 

He unfolds the toilet paper and reads: Owens did it. Billy will come to yours on Sunday night. Don’t fuck it up.

The ball he obtains from that message centers the bin perfectly and Steve claps himself slowly, in the loneliness of the shop. He stares then at the numbers on the cash, the importance of what is about to happen hitting him, a tsunami.

It’s only Tuesday, but he feels like he has a shitload of work to do to welcome Billy properly. First on the list is trying not to get on each other’s nerves during the first five minutes of cohabitation. He makes a point of being as nice as possible, don’t let their differences fuck it up because Max deserves it, the people who have not been lucky enough to survive deserve it and, after all the trauma he’s undergone, Hargrove himself deserves it.

He spends the rest of his working day planning the next steps and, once at home, he starts transferring all his most personal belongings in his dad’s big office; his books, the most of his clothes and photos, mostly of Nancy but nobody needs to know that. 

He’s not planning on sleeping in his parents’ room, that area is locked up in his mind, does not want to go there for five minutes either. So he will have to opt for the couch, while Billy will have his room.

He tidies up what’s left, changes the sheets, then realizes it’s only Tuesday again and sighs. He leaves the new sheets on and figures he’ll adapt to the couch beforehand, he sleeps there most of the time anyway.

Steve even cleans up the kitchen, he throws away rotten tomatoes and a piece of cheese covered in mold. He makes a mental note of doing some grocery shopping when the completely empty fridge stares back at him. 

He checks the bathrooms, mentally thanks his parents for the personnel they hired because he wouldn’t know where to start with the cleaning there and then forces himself to get out of the house because he’s starting to suffocate.

He changes into some gym pants and a long-sleeved jersey, does something he has not in years; he starts jogging. 

The sun is warm on his skin, the sweat that quickly pools at his collarbone, trailing down his neck, turns cold as the chilly air moves against his jogs. The sky is scattered with some gold and pink clouds and, in the same colors, the tips of trees’ fronds at both sides of the road.

Steve has stopped exercising in the open after Barbara was killed. He didn’t actively choose to, it just happened. In retrospect, he figures he was dealing with the shock in his own personal way. Nancy had freaked out, crying, shouting, getting drunk that one time she said “You’re bullshit.” And he had stopped running.

Steve increases his pace, the heartbeat pumping right into his ears almost blocks out the hurt in Nancy’s eyes when she had accused him of not caring. He should have known right then that something irreparable had happened between them, the final proof that Harrington and Wheeler, the golden couple, did not get each other that much anymore. And Steve is ashamed to say the first sensation he had felt, along with melancholy, had been a hit to his ego.

He had lied to his parents for weeks after the breakup, when they asked him about his girlfriend, too scared his dad would find him even more pathetic, blaming him in a not-so-subtle way for being a failure; in contrast, his mother would have pitied the shit out of him. And Steve couldn’t choose which death was the best.

But now, at the end of the cold October of 1985, Steve feels ready again. Needs to. His strides are still good, his hair sways in his peripheral vision and the forest does not bother him as much. 

He thinks about Billy Hargrove, then, a thought that has accompanied him since his Awakening, hidden under tons of other things Steve focuses on daily. The look on his face had pinned him to the wall, the only reason he didn’t move was Max’s hug. He had felt dirty, after that, when Billy was probably experiencing one of the most traumatic days of his life and didn’t even know Steve Harrington had peeped in. When he was most vulnerable.

Still, Steve thinks, and thought after the nightmare concerning Billy, that the boy looked fierce, unbent, even in that state, laced up as if he escaped an asylum. The complete surprise of waking up from almost death didn’t do anything to turn off the fire burning inside of him.

Steve continues running, even if his lungs are asking him to stop.

He has chosen to stay on the side of the road unwinding in the middle of the tall trees instead of turning left, where the only destination were the houses forming Hawkins. He has had enough of fake pumpkins and weird looking scarecrows in farms, in the driveways.

Steve thinks they all don’t know what they’re talking about. What real monsters look like. The dark image of a child dressed up as a demogorgon flashes through his mind and he almost laughs.

He’s thrilled to be out, in the open, his neck exposed to whatever lurks in the shadows. Steve’s twisted mind welcomes the sunset and prays for something to take life, attack him. He’d fight with whatever he has, knowing there’s no hope, but feeling full, accomplished. He wonders to whom his last thoughts would go; Nancy? His mother? Max? 

He halts abruptly, his breath so heavy, in the middle of physical strain and a mild panic attack. He feels disgusting, floating in a thick, slimy black liquid, generating straight from his mind.

All of a sudden, the forest looks scary, the positive chills gone in favor of frightened ones. Steve turns back slowly and forces himself to walk for a bit, tries to stretch the limits of his fear and resists a total of five minutes before sprinting back to the house.

When he showers he looks down and hopes to see that slimy shit falling down the drain, where his skin has pushed it out along sweat. Squints his eyes when he realizes the water is melting with his tears. 

He feels rotten, broken. On a rollercoaster of normal and mental. He’s searching for a reference point but there’s nothing. Just an empty house.

Laying down on the couch, in the living room, still just in a towel, Steve feels cold and doesn’t care. The house has always been too big, the ceilings too high, for some warmth to stay. And he’s been hating it, until now, where too cold feels like the perfect temperature, matches his insides so well.

He hopes his and Billy’s desperations won’t be the perfect ingredients for a nuclear explosion that will blow up the damn house. Maybe he’s embarked in something that will make him feel slightly threatened, like he was at the side of the road. And he will like it because, perhaps, it will be what ultimately destroys him. 

And Steve often begs for it.  
~ 

The doctor, the one with the big glasses that he can now tell apart from the others, all of them looking a lot duller without masks and suits, tells him it’s Sunday. He says it hurriedly, while moving around all the machines surrounding Billy like he’s bothered by them just as much.

“We have to hurry up, Mr. Hargrove,” he rushes, helps him get up and hands over a pair of sweats and a jumper. Some sneakers too, which are the first thing he’s wearing after the infinity passed in hospital slip-ons. Billy feels overwhelmed as he changes in the bathroom, Owens words keep echoing in his head.

'I convinced them to transfer you. Remember you’re not free to go, but enjoy some fresh air, son, you need it.'

The clothes are too big for him, they stink of staleness. He washes his face and grips the edges of the sink, trying to collect all his internal willpower. He’s not sure what will happen, they could be bringing him in a similar clinic or, Billy thinks, the Pentagon even, treating him like an alien freak show.

He has to run off, where they will leave him be. Alone, because Billy has had enough of causing pain to innocent people.

Even if he’s screamed and kicked to have this moment, when he finally gets to leave the damn room that has become his prison, when they escort him outside, in a long hallway he has never seen, he finds himself missing the comfort of the bed. The undertone of certainty it’s brought to him, like it was shielded in some way from reaching him, right there with all the scientists’ eyes on him.

Logically, though, his heart pumps adrenaline in his veins, screams to have some fresh air, hopes the sun won’t hurt him too much.

“You’ll find some of your belongings in the car waiting for you outside,” tells him the doctor when they arrive at yet another electric door. Behind it, two soldiers move sideways to invite him to proceed. “Good luck. I’ll see you soon, Mr. Hargrove.”

Billy does not say anything as the door closes back, just lopsidedly looks at the two bulky man, armed at the belt, and grunts. He does not get the rushing, nobody is trying to kidnap him, right? Owens told him the Mind Flayer has been defeated, what else could possibly threaten Billy?

As the elevator brings them up, in a hall full of daylight, coming from all the windows, Billy realizes it was never about keeping someone out, but blocking him in.

The sun hits his skin and he hisses, figures something must have changed from the one kissing him back in California, in between waves, while surfing. The sun shining in Indiana is poisoned as everything else here. It gets inside your bones and rattles them open. The shadow of the black car he gets in is a relief.

He has to wait some more. He curls on the backseat, watches passively as the building he’s been kept in disappears slowly, replaced by the unholy forest circling Hawkins. He distractedly remembers driving down those same roads, fast. Asks himself what happened there, what changed, and can’t really tell.

“Where are we fucking going?” he asks the driver, a thin glass booth between them, but does not receive an answer. So he diverts his attention to the duffel bag resting on the seat next to his, frowns while unzipping it. 

At the sight of some of his clothes, his boots and little else, he angrily shoves the bag far from him. They got their fucking hands on fucking everything, they went to his house and grabbed his things like that will do him any good, like it will change anything.

Billy knows anger, has known it all his life, but the wrath he feels in that car is unprecedented. The feeling of helplessness he has felt with his father, his mother, his new family, idiots at school, work, even being transformed in a murderer, all of that, adds up and Billy can’t control it anymore.

The first kick he throws at the booth is strong enough to make it tremble, he’s sustaining his own weight on the handles of the car and he winds another hit. “Fuck all of you,” he hisses, “Fuck. You.”

As he kicks again, he sees the worried look on the driver’s face, feels the power coming from the man’s fear. Feeds off it. Like it fed off death. It’s the same feeling and the glass shatters while all Billy’s head registers is Heather’s shouts, her family’s, the thin kid with that hat’s, the fat old woman’s, the man in the uniform’s.

“Don’t be afraid. It’ll all be over soon,” he howls to the driver, who has sped up. His tongue is out and he can feel his eyes widen to the point of pain. He has to make the fucking car stop, has to run away. Billy has to. “Just try to hold still.”

His hands fly to the man’s arms, pulling them away from the wheel, that familiar madness shooting through his body, up and down, like a crazy ball. The car skids while the man orders Billy to get off of him. Billy laughs, thinks about how stupid was of them putting him in a car, alone with the driver, unsupervised.

Didn’t they measure how many times a day his skin crawled to get out? Even when he feels paralyzed, underwater with muffled sounds and blurry vision, his mind screams, trapped in the trauma he didn’t ask for. He tells himself he doesn’t care, but conservation instincts kick in every time and he shakes out of his trance with a need for freedom bigger and bigger.

He knows he can’t kill no one else, though, he wouldn’t survive that either. So he tries to get the driver to finally stop by obscuring his sight, he places his hands over his eyes and barks at him to stop. “I’ll kill you, I fucking swear,” he lies, presses on the man’s skin.

The car comes to a stop, brakes screeching, grey smoke rises from the tires. The door locks don’t click up, Billy notices. The man shakes Billy’s hands off and swiftly reaches under his seat. Billy has a gun pointed at his head in no time. A big one, too.

“Fucking seat back, asshole!” the driver shouts, he’s in a suit, but Billy laughs at himself when he sees the firm grip the man has on the weapon. A soldier. “Hands up.”

Billy sits back, his annoyance well hidden under his carefree smirk. He keeps his hands down, shoves them in the pockets of his trousers as he feels the blood coming from the shards of glass’s cuts on his palms, his neck. They don’t sting in the least, Billy’s too hyped, the excitement of the almost-flight pumping him up like some crack-addict.

“Hands up. Now!”

“You can’t shoot me,” Billy shuffles in the leather of the seat to get more comfortable.

“You don’t know that,” the soldier grunts back, the brown of his skin matching his dark eyes, dilated in alert.

Billy shrugs, bents over until the cold metal of the gun is pressing against his forehead. And the sense of freedom he craves so much comes back, stronger than ever. There’s more than one way to get away from them, Billy thinks as he smirks madly. “Then do it.”

The man stares at Billy in the eyes. The situation is so unrealistic a wave of hilarity pops in Billy’s chest once again, but never really comes out. There’s immobility in the car, still in the middle of the empty road on a Sunday afternoon.

“Do it!” Billy snarls, he grabs the gun’s barrel and pushes it against his face forcefully.

The man evaluates, looks at Billy and the anger he’d immediately felt flows away from his eyes. “Get the fuck back on the seat and don’t try anything.”

Billy is disappointed, remains still in that position even when the car jolts to life. He has a ‘Or what?’ on the tip of his tongue. But the soldier does not need that vocal prompt to answer, “Or you’d prefer going back to the clinic and rot there?”

Billy is fucked, knows being imprisoned there would be worst than death. He kicks the back of the driver’s seat one more time, for good measure, and deflates. He boils, he had the chance to get away and now nothing has changed, Old Billy would have been adamant, probably tried to strangle the man that looks so much like that kid Sinclair that once hit him in the junk. But Old Billy knows nothing about having to bring preys to a master you can’t say no to, stay there and watch as life gets sucked out of them.

He grits his teeth and digs nails in his own skin, marking it a bit, scratching for the rest of the trip.

It takes them half an hour to get to their destination. Both of them have remained silent, but the broken glasses dingle when the tires meet an irregularity on the road. The gun is now well visible on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. Billy’s blood has stained his clothes in several spots and he doesn’t notice.

They’re near Hawkins’ centre. Billy’s head spins right and left to try and understand what is the plan. In the background a chant of run run run makes his sneakers feel too tight. 

The car’s engine stops roaring in the driveway of a fairly big white house that Billy has never seen. He hypothesizes it could be Owens’s, or maybe some place the government uses to keep its freaks. Billy’s sure there’s a basement three times bigger under it, where he will probably be put. Wonders what the fuck of a difference does it make from the clinic, why did Owens try to convince him he was putting in a good word for him, when clearly all he did was concede a car trip. One that lacked a lot of comforts, if you ask Billy.

“This is what will happen,” tells him the driver, as the front door of the house opens and Jim Hopper steps outside, “You keep your mouth shut on what happened and I’ll do the same.”

Billy thinks about it for a second. He could use people not knowing he plans to run away, thinks the soldier has to report how his little mission went, probably expects some kind of reward for having completed it without problems. So he nods because, even if Neil wouldn’t agree with him, on this particular type of person, he knows it’s what’s best for him. And Chief Hopper is steadily walking in their direction.

“Splendid,” the man plasters a white smile on his face and gets out of the car, quickly proceeds to unlock Billy’s door. When he invites him to get off it’s with the same smile, just on the verge of menacing. Billy is a master of that smile, so he does the same.

“Billy, man,” greets him Hopper, his eyes scan the stains on his clothes and Billy thinks he is not a shitty cop, even more so when he eyes the inside of the car, where the mess is visible even through the blinded windows. Hopper doesn’t flinch, though, shakes the driver’s hand and takes Billy’s bag where the man hands it to him. 

Billy looks around, sees the deep of the forest staring back at him in the blueish light of the aftermath of dawn, thinks about how much he could run before straining himself. 

Hopper’s big hand on his shoulder snaps him out of it, Billy feels it in his fingers that he’s promising to do whatever necessary to keep him there and Billy sighs.

“Where are we?” it’s the first thing he says in Jim’s presence.

“You’ll like it better than your old room,” informs him the cop, which is not an answer and Billy is still considering sprinting in the trees now. For some reason, though, he lets curiosity have the best of him and steps inside the house.

There’s a polished staircase on the right, the hall opens in the living room on the opposite side of it and the ceilings are so high they remind Billy of one of those California mansions he used to party at, they were always of some spoiled rich kid Billy hated. He made sure to break a thing or two by the end of the night, just because.

“Hop, where’s the—oh,” comes from up the stairs. Billy’s eyes spring to the point where the voice comes from and, well, Owens is making a sport out of surprising him, apparently.

“Harrington.”

The door closes behind him and Billy is made of stone. Steve Harrington was occasionally part of his life before, seeing him again does weird things to Billy. It makes him sad, and angry, but mostly sad. 

“Hey, Billy,” Steve recollects himself as he jogs to the end of the stairs. “How’re you doing?”

Billy sizes him up. He’s wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, like the cold in the room does not bother him. He has that stupid quiff of his and, right under it, his big brown eyes and cherry lips puckered. Billy snaps a look at Jim, sees him avoid his questioning eyes. “Is this some kind of joke, Chief?”

Jim sighs, drops Billy’s bag on the white marbled floor. “Steve knows, Billy.”

Billy feels like laughing, but not really. He thinks that, maybe, he’s not the mental one, maybe he’s the only one sane.

“Yeah,” Steve says awkwardly, sinks his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looks down, sheepishly. Billy tsks, King Steve.

“Harrington, I’m sure you know a lot of things, but there must be some mistake here,” Billy bends to take his bag. “Chief, let me hit the road on my own. I swear you’ll never have to hear from me again, I’ll leave this shithole of a town alone.”

Jim rips the duffel bag from him and passes it on to Steve that looks as perplexed as he can get. His stupid face makes Billy’s hand twitch. “Yeah, no. It’s either this shithole or the clinic in the middle of the fields,” Hopper shoves him further into the house and Billy lets him. “Where nobody can hear you scream,” the cop adds, darkly enough for Billy to shut up for the time being.

It’s just like that that Billy lets Harrington show him around the house, with his hands moving in the air, his words quick like he would rather be doing something else. It makes him feel at school once again, the mix of his face and uneasiness that comes with Billy’s presence. The only difference being Steve Harrington, he was never one of those intimidated by Billy’s mannerism, he always looked like he had somewhere else to be, better things to do. Now, Billy guesses, Steve has him to do.

“And this is my, yours actually, room,” Steve opens the door of the bedroom and Billy thinks that it must be twice what he got at Neil’s house. The bed is king-sized and very few posters are scattered on the walls, mainly of bands Billy dislikes. He steps in and can tell Steve has made a good job at clearing the place from his belongings, he grins. “I’ll sleep downstairs. If you, you know, need anything or stuff.”

Billy throws himself on the bed, jumps with the mattress when his body hits it. The grin still there. Steve awkwardly stands on the doorway, looking at Billy as if he’s trying to decipher him. Billy sustains his gaze, until Harrington gives in and backs off. “So, yeah, I’ll be in the kitchen, there’s some pizza.”

And with that he leaves, the fast pace of his steps on the carpets disappears. Billy props up on his elbows and stares at the open door, then gets up and slams it close.

He’d like to eat, but can’t bring himself to be in Jim and Steve’s presence like everything is right and they’re friends hanging out. He has to figure a way out, but for now, he could use a comfy, huge, bed and some free food, until he sets a plan. 

He falls asleep in his underwear, after a short trip to the bathroom to wash away the blood on his skin, the same Harrington had looked at with a curious pinch to his brows. Downstairs, the jingle he distractedly recognizes as Indiana Jones’s.

Getting out of there will be a walk in the park.  
~

Billy’s first night at his feels surreal. Looking back, Steve’s past week is a blur of recommendations from Hopper, Owens and Bald Eagle. He’s tried to prep himself mentally, has been told he can withdraw whenever, but Steve knows that’s not true.

First of all, they all owe Billy for saving Eleven by sacrificing himself; when Mike had told them the story, Steve had felt so out of place, uncomfortable. The image he had of Billy, this reckless prick, a killer after the Mind Flayer came into the picture, collided with what he had done. Secondly, he genuinely thought he’d never hear of the guy again, let alone see him. Not to forget that helping him alongside the Secret Services sounds like a joke to his own ears.

“Secret Services,” he lets the words roll on his tongue, in the dark of the living room where he has yet to fall asleep. Looks over at his dad’s photo, “That’d make you proud,” he whispers, because he’s so aware of not being alone this time.

He sighs, it’s a pity his parents will never know about Billy, the spiked bat or the monsters. Maybe Mr. Harrington would shut up for once and not make Steve feel like a piece of shit.

Jim had made him lock all the windows on the first floor, he had gone and sealed them while Hopper kept the ladder still and smoked a cigar. Steve had looked at him weirdly, but obliged, he trusts Hopper’s cop-sixth sense more than he trusts himself. “Blue eyes could try and get some fresh air unsupervised,” he had said.

Steve reckons he’d want to run away from a prison too, even if it looked like Steve’s house. A cage’s a cage.

And Billy looked like he could do some fresh air, his skin on this side of illness and Steve had had to stop himself from staring too much at the buzzcut that made him look even thinner than what he’d become. Steve estimated that Billy was still quite built under the baggy clothes, though, being his constitution stockier than lean.

The blood on his neck and hands had raised all another series of questions that he didn’t voice. The coarse expression of Billy enough of an answer.

He looks at his room’s closed door every two minutes, wonders what is Billy up to behind it and then tries to remember he has just to host him, not understand whatever crosses his damaged mind. He has his own problems as it is, thank you.

Once Steve is finally dozing off, a hand dangling from the sofa, a loud scream wakes him up.

He’d been waiting for it, even if he didn’t realize he was. Owens had warned Steve about Billy’s nightmares, how bad they can be and what horrible things he can let out, but this sound, this sound has Steve’s body jolting awake and he sits up, grabbing the tv controller from the coffee table to wield it as a weapon.

Billy’s voice—does not sound human. It’s a deep growl, he howls and shouts in baritones Steve has never heard. He keeps saying “No!” on repeat and Steve’s stomach sinks.

He’s on his feet before he registers it, he climbs up the stairs slowly enough for the creep to spread in his mind, making his heart jump at every new shout.

He considers going in, shaking the boy awake and telling him that it was just a nightmare, nothing real. But Steve knows better, lingers in the doorway long enough for Billy’s voice to become a new way of marking time. He paces up and down, his socked feet are probably going to create a lighter path where he passes on the grey carpet.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he grasps at his hair, covers his ears, tries to concentrate when all Billy does is sound like a demon. Steve has the ”helper syndrome”, that’s how Robin had defined it once, but Steve does not agree. He just, he wants for Billy to stop hurting. “Shit, fuck.”

Steve is getting affected by the dark house and the deep tone. Black memories crack his apparent tranquility and he feels that thrill he hates as much as he starves for. The need to bare his neck for Billy’s howls is something primal, starts from his guts and washes over everything else.

He kicks the door, repeatedly, hard enough for the sound to reverberate in the house, alongside Billy’s screams. He can try to wake him up by not intruding too much in the other guy’s space. And, honestly, it’s all his three-in-the-morning mind can come up with. Maybe he damages the wood, but he also doesn’t care because Billy’s voice halts immediately, Steve can only hear heavy gasps now.

His tense nerves relax and his limbs feel like jelly, kept together by the layer of skin. He collapses on the floor near the door and tells himself he’ll just wait a few minutes to make sure Billy goes back to sleep and does not dream anymore. He does this because he has work in the morning, he tells himself, but again, at an unholy hour in the morning he has not quite the force to lie.

That’s how he falls asleep, slouched on the carpet because his parents’ bedroom is not in the picture. Not for him. Never was.

The doorbell ringing startles him awake the next morning and Steve looks around to make sure Billy’s not there, seeing him drool on the floor like a moron.

He wobbles to the door with squinted eyes, probably his hair is a right mess too.

“Buongiorno!” greets him Murray Bauman, the sunlight coming from behind him is too flashy for Steve’s morning sensibility and he grunts. “Where’s the subject?”

Steve turns his head some to check the time on the design wall clock and gulps loudly. “Oh, shit,” he lets Murray in the entrance and bolts to his father’s studio to get on his uniform, he’s so screwed. He jiggles the pants up, door open and, for a spare moment, he forgets all about the Govern. He becomes George and George needs to work in order to pay for food, his parents had been clear about that point. Especially Mr. Harrington.

Steve skips brushing his teeth and peeing, he will do the latter at work. Grabs some of the leftover, cold, pizza from the night before and aims for the door. Jacket halfway on, slice in his mouth and car keys in his free hand. He’s also pretty sure the sneakers he got on are of different kinds.

“Boy!” stops him Murray, placing himself to block the way.

“Oh, yes, right,” he gets out, hurriedly. “He’s still sleeping in my room. Upstairs, third door on the left. There’s food in the fridge, he’ll be hungry. I’ll be back by one.”

Murray opens his mouth to say something, by the look of him it must be an annoyed consideration. Probably of how Steve is not handling the situation properly. The world may never know, though, because he pats Murray on the chest and gets out with a “Thanks, Eagle!”

As he backs out from his driveway, Steve peeks at his house, wonders if it’ll find it intact when he comes back. If Billy will still be there. 

He then speeds down the road, passes by the two cars stationed there and awkwardly waves at the agents inside. This will never get old, he will never adjust.

In front of the Supermarket there’s an unusual crowd. And with crowd, Steve counts four people total. One of them is Nancy Wheeler.

She has that expression on her face that says “We need to talk.” Steve used to be so scared by. Now, he takes pride in how slowly he opens the shop’s double door and serves all the old ladies, answering their questions about his parents with a smile worth a million dollars. 

Once it’s only him and Nancy, he sits down on the swivel chair and leans against the desk. “You look horrible, Steve, what happened?”

Nancy was never one to tip toe around things, Steve usually appreciates this, but now it wrecks his nerves even more. His neck aches and he could use ten hours of sleep. “You needed anything?” he avoids her question, pretends to be counting the coins in the electric drawer, but really just plays with them.

“It’s about Mrs. Dayton’s story. We should go check the neighborhood tomorrow night.”

She sounds thrilled and Steve must do the exact opposite when he asks, “Tomorrow? Why?”

“Steve,” she says, the patronizing pitch in her voice worsens his thumping headache severally. “You sure you’re okay?”

Steve is about to tell her, spill everything on Billy, the agents surrounding the house, Murray Bauman wanting to be called stupid spy names. Instead, he shrugs, “Rough night, might be sick.”

“I’m sorry it has to be on your favorite night of the year, though,” Nancy smiles sweetly, reaches for his forearm and strokes gently. Steve melts under it, big time.

“Uh?” he catches up after a second.

“Halloween? I mean I remember you telling me that, but maybe it’s different now and I wouldn’t know, so. Yeah,” her hand is back on her purse, her big eyes look around. 

Halloween. Tomorrow is Halloween and Steve forgot. This is not good. Not good.

He will have to lie to more people and sooner than expected.

“No, yeah, you’re right. Sorry, I’m a bit out of it, you know,” he points at his head like having had a bad night sleep is a good enough excuse for almost anything. But it probably is, because Nancy smiles again now.

“No worries. I’ll go with Jonathan, we’ll bring Will and Mike to trick or treat there,” she plans, Steve can almost see her brain cells move behind the thin cheeks. God, she’s so intelligent. “I’ll tell you what I find. Can’t lose my partner now.”

Steve smiles at her, small and shy. Remembers what made him fight for her to the point of ridiculousness more than once, when he looks at her decisive stance. Nancy Wheeler attracted (and still does because Steve is a sucker) him because she is everything he is not. He is not confident, brave or stubborn like her. And he cares too much about what other people think. He was never a good boyfriend for her, he’s happy she considers him her friend, though.

“Sure thing, Nancy, I promise I’ll come next time.”

She nods and steps away. “Uh, Steve?”

“Yeah?”

Nancy lingers by the glass door, “Could you not tell Jonathan about all of this? I’d prefer it remained between us.”

Steve lowers his eyes while still facing her, nods and he’s serious, “Of course.” 

He watches her leave, with that quick pace of hers, all hunched shoulders like she knows how bad the world can turn for people like them, people that know too much. Steve sometimes wishes he hadn’t gone to apologize to her at Byers’ that day, when the light was flicking and his face was cut, bruised, because he can’t really win fistfights.

Nancy has asked him to keep quiet about the whole thing for Jonathan’s sake, his sanity ranks high in his girlfriend’s priority, with all that happened to little Will and their mother. Steve gets it, but. He is jealous, he would like to have his family around, knowing what he does, because sharing heavy-weight information about other dimensions is basically caring.

During the long shift, Steve tries to keep occupied as best as he can. Indulges in an endless conversation about which is the best cat food with Dustin’s mom and ends up hearing all about the new kitten’s prodigies. It’s boring and it’s nice. When Mrs. Henderson leaves the shop, he goes to the animal isle, reorganizes it so that she will find all her favorites next to each other next time she visits.

Florence from the police station stops by, too. She peers at him from above her glasses and hums to herself. Steve rationally thinks that she doesn’t know why his eyes are puffy and there are dark marks under them, but he suddenly feels like an open book in front of her. “Do you happen to know what is Hop up to, kid?” she asks, measures how his face reacts to it.

Steve is confused, what should he say that sounds convincing enough? 

“Uhm, no,” is his brilliant answer while he struggles finding the price on a detergent bottle. He recoils, “I mean, he’s a great cop, he probably is making sure everyone is okay after the tragedy.”

Playing the ‘tragedy’ card is low, but that’s all that comes to his mind under her piercing stare. “I agree. He’s a good Sheriff,” she concedes, takes her bag of products and stays still, watching him some more. “But he’s also really inconsiderate of his well-being. Make sure all of you don’t get involved in something too big, alright, love?”

Her words are sweet, but they sound like an order and Steve straightens up, nods. 

Maybe Florence has known all along. Maybe even before Eleven appeared, because Steve can’t think of anything going on in Hawkins without her wise supervision. She’s a damn good cop, too.

And perhaps his face is a right disaster, the bathroom in the back of the shop does not have a mirror so Steve couldn’t check his conditions this morning, but he has a general idea. A total mess. Inside and out, because his face says he has not slept while his head keeps reminding him why.

The clock ticks as Steve feels threatened by the time passing by, too quick, too slow. He wants to know what Billy is doing, if he ever got out of Steve’s room and if the doctors already arrived for their daily check-ups. He wonders if Murray has been too annoying with him, to the point Billy considers running away that same day.

When finally, finally, his shift is over, he gets up and hurries to the car. Not waiting for Joyce Byers’ car to show up, he locks the door of the Supermarket and drives toward his house. Once there, though, he’s not sure what the next step is. He gets in, then greets everyone like all of this is totally normal? Does he have to let himself look a bit freaked out? 

‘Fuck it’ is pretty much the philosophy he steps inside with.

The house is creepily silent, feels as it usually does, only it shouldn’t.

“Hey?” he calls out. “Is anyone in here?”

He stops himself from shouting Billy’s name like he’s authorized to, when the man probably hates him. Deeply.

He freezes on the spot as, from the kitchen, the chilly autumnal breeze hits him in the face. Steve runs to the glass door facing the back yard and the pool, terrified. His heart drums so much and the sweat forms down his neck, as cold as the air. “Jesus, fuck.”

This is not okay. Billy probably escaped and Murray is tracking his movements down in the forest. But—the agents in their cars were still outside Steve’s house, he has seen one of them yawning, even, so Steve is baffled. 

He finds Murray Bauman on a lounger by the pool. He has a pacific expression as he sunbathes in his jacket, the little sun peeking through the trees too weak to warm anything up. “Murray, what happened?!” he nearly runs to him, eyes wide, hands all over the place. “Where’s Billy?”

The man smiles sardonically, puts both his hands under his head and relaxes some more on the lounger, Steve is going to kill him. “He’s in your room, where he should be.”

The relief Steve feels is almost painful, it relaxes the pressure on his vessels too suddenly for it to be comfortable. “God, Murray. For a moment I thought— it doesn’t matter.”

He collapses on the chair next to the man and takes in deep breaths. Murray looks slightly offended, but does not comment on it. Then, another thought hits Steve’s tired head, struggling to catch up with everything. “Are you sure it’s safe keeping the backdoor open? He could—“

“Please, kid, I’m not some amateur. I damn know my way around watches,” Murray crosses his arms and his dark beard is up, sour. He then takes a little key out of his pant pocket, shakes it in the air, triumphal. “I’ve keyed him down.”

Steve stands up, “What?”. His eyes shoot at his own bedroom’s window, the blinders are down and Steve feels sick. Rage boils under his skin, “He’s not a fucking animal, you can’t lock him up just like that! What if he needs the bathroom or—or he’s hungry.”

Murray is calm as he scans Steve from head to toe, considering. He sighs, “I’m glad you two are best friends now, but I go check on him every hour, I wasn’t born yesterday, Steve,” Murray never calls him by his name, he’s trying to make a point. “Plus, he didn’t want to eat. Not even Owens convinced him, so...”

Steve is inside before Murray can finish the sentence. He has to take some distance before he grabs the man by the beard and throws him out of his house. A shouted “He’s confined in here anyway, what’s the difference!?”

Steve, opening the fridge to check what’s inside, thinks that there’s a fucking huge difference. He will tell Jim to put Murray back in his place as soon as possible, or he won’t want him near his house anymore. He drops two eggs and some bacon in a pan, gets out again while they cook.

He reaches his hand out, palm upside, “Keys, please.”

He takes them from Murray’s hand with a sound deep in his throat, almost a growl. “You can go, now. Thanks, Murray.”

It takes a lot of fucking effort not shoving him to the door, but he manages and relaxes his shoulders only when the man is out without a word more.

Steve climbs up the stairs with the plate he’s prepared and a bottle of water; knocks on the door with his foot, softly but loud enough to be hearable from the inside. “Billy?” he tries, “Can I come in?”

“It’s your fucking house, Harrington, do whatever,” snaps Billy from the room and it saddens Steve how jumpy he sounds, like someone betrayed his minimum trust in humanity once again.

He turns the key in the lock, enters slowly not to startle the wounded creature inside.

Billy is standing by his desk, on it there’s a mess of books Steve does not remember having. The boy looks wary, tired in his clothes, too big for him. Steve notices the bag is still where he put it down the day before, unopened.

“Brought you some food,” he says, goes over to lay the plate on the desk, among the books. Notices how Billy’s eyes dart to the open door, then to Steve, then the door again. “I’m sorry about him, he didn’t have any right to—“

“I don’t care,” cuts him off Billy. He eyes the food, “I’m not hungry.”

Steve stands there, takes the time to really look at Billy. His blue eyes are a bit off and the short hair is disheveled, Steve has the weird urge of putting it back in place. He says instead, “You can take what you want from my drawer. It should all fit you.”

Billy simply stares back at him, sees through Steve directly to the wall behind him.

“All right, I fuck off now,” Steve mutters awkwardly, attempts half a smile, but it dies immediately on his lips. It feels wrong, out of place completely. Billy’s piercing eyes follow him, the stubble on his upper lip looks dark against his pale skin. Before leaving the room, he drops the key on the blankets of his bed.

He has a lot of questions for Billy, always has, from the moment Joyce Byers told him and the children Billy survived the Mind Flayer’s attack. But, when the slightly younger man looks at him, Steve can’t remember any of them, knows Billy won’t answer anyway.

He spends the rest of the day by the pool. He smokes and stares at the forest over the fence, he considers going there until it’s pitch dark to find the answers he needs. Maybe he will get eaten alive, but looking at the dead leaves floating on the artificially blue water he thinks that he has been lucky, all things considered. And everybody dies, at some point.

He occasionally nods at the agents pacing around the house, checks the glass backdoor where he’s shut it. He thinks about Billy’s dark, long, lashes, how they fluttered to the door, thinks about the freedom he has and Billy hasn’t. To Steve, this doesn’t feel like freedom, he can’t leave the town for a day and not feel stressed over what’s happening there. 

The smoke floats to the sky in circles, he thinks about the closed Gate that cages him in. Traps Steve in his skin, too tight on his grumbling belly. He realizes he hasn’t eaten when Robin calls and she’s munching on something hard while she tells him about this Halloween party they have to go to, just outside Hawkins. He lies and tells her he has promised to bring the kids around, to which Robin scoffs (Steve can almost hear her roll eyes to the back of her head) and calls him a Dingus, but she understands and wishes him a happy Halloween.

When Dustin rings him, Steve informs him he won’t go trick or treat with them because he’s attending a party with Robin. The Friends don’t lie reverberates in his skull, sounds like Jane’s voice.

“You’re ditching us to snog on some stranger’s patio with your girlfriend?” accuses the child, his lisp heavy. Steve has not got it in him to deny for the billionth time that no, him and Robin are not like that. “You go, Steve! You’re a Terminator!”

He cuts there the conversation and goes back to the lounger. If he naps until dark and feels the cold creeping through the sweater he’s put over the uniform, that’s for him and the guards strolling in his garden to know.  
~

Steve’s room is full of shit. Books Billy starts and then leaves there, music he doesn’t listen to, a guitar. Billy looks at the layer of dust on it, blows it away and touches the cords. His mom used to string notes every now and then, even Neil stopped ranting about stuff and listened to her.

He changes in a pair of green basketball shorts and a t-shirt, finds out he has the exact same size as Steve and grunts. He’s heard him from downstairs, telling everybody to basically fuck off, he’s not available for Halloween. And it’s not like Billy was interested in Steve’s business, but he’s kind of bored and wants to fucking understands what is happening there.

To understand Harrington because—

Why Steve is hosting him in his rich boy mansion is still something he doesn’t get. And, how much does he know? Has anyone told him about Billy’s almost-death? He knows that he can’t be trusted and is dangerous? He hopes that it’s a no for the first question and a fucking yes for the latter. Billy needs for Steve to understand that he’s not a fragile shelter animal he adopts to feel less guilty about whatever it is that always casts a shadow on his square face.

Billy hates a lot of things, people too, but Steve Harrington was never one of those. He’d liked to take the piss, challenge the school’s king, nothing else. Billy knows well which battles to pick; the fact that he often chooses the wrong ones, consciously, does not matter. 

But Steve rubs at him in the wrong way, with how he looks at Billy.

That man with the beard and the weird look on his face was a pain in the ass, admittedly. He’d locked him in Harrington’s room because Billy had tried to force the window open. Ridiculous.

He sits at Steve’s desk and looks at the full plate, his stomach pleads him to go forward and devour all of it. Billy remembers he’s trying to make a point, trying to be difficult. He actively wants everyone to just give up on him. But, at the same time, he has to convince them that he is not a threat. Anyway, he surely needs energy to cope with the pile of shit his life has become, so he gives in and cleans the ceramic. He doesn’t even use cutlery, like the beast he knows to be.

Billy then goes to shower. He covers the distance between Steve’s room and the bathroom with long strides. He can’t be seen, talked to or anything in between. 

He lets the cold stream unearth his pain and let it pool at his feet for a moment of relief. Looking down, at the body he’s worked so hard for, he can only see destruction, the ugly scars a constant reminder that no, he can’t go back. He traces them with trembling fingers, feels the ghost of open wounds and blood, its putrid body, made of human rests, inside him. Can’t brush it off even if he tries, to the point of making his skin become an even deeper red.

This is why he usually showers with the lights off, it makes him feels like himself a little longer. 

In Harrington’s house, though, he tries to be as good as any rich, lucky, kid. Billy’s pride is what keeps him alive most of the time, anyway. He does not cry too much over himself after Neil hits him, he doesn’t tell anyone what happens at home, feels the familiar sting in the middle of his chest when doctors poke at him like a piece of meat, when Steve Harrington looks at him after cooking him things, like he’s not afraid of Billy. 

And he should be so fucking much, more so if he knows what Billy did.

He turns the handle to boiling hot and lets himself suffer under it, not just because he’s actually cooking his skin, but because he feels the remaining of the monster, these little patches of skin they share, his guts and the dark side of his mind, scream in pain. He grins sadistically and stays put until the hot water runs out and he thinks Harrington will have to take a cold shower.

Good.

The thought lingers there, in the steam on the mirror, where Billy can barely see his reflection as shapes and colors. 

He’ll get out of there.  
~

The second night, Billy screams as loud as the first. They’re incoherent words, chants of whining Steve knows he will be able to hear for the whole day, after. Resorts for banging on his door and stopping on the floor beside it, waiting. 

Only, this time he returns to the couch and gets to sleep on something softer than a carpet. It lasts a few hours because Steve has this restlessness that can’t be controlled in the first hours of the day, when the air outside looks painted in blue, almost like the pool.

He bites down on a toast with jam, his sweatpants low and he thinks about going for a jog when Hopper gets here, to burn off the tension on his day off. 

Then, Billy appears. At first is a shadow, so noiseless Steve thinks he’s hallucinating, half in the dark, the toast held to his mouth, still. His heartbeats increase, he feels his skin hitch, in his drowsiness he grabs the knife he’s used for jam.

“Be careful with sharp knives in the dark,” comes Billy’s voice, “King Steve.”

Billy’s voice sounds as edgy as the blade, he wants to stab Steve in so many different ways. And Steve—his muscles relax a bit, just because it’s Billy and not a demo version of a bestiality, but, at the same time, it’s Billy. Steve’s mind flies to where he has put the keys, under the pillow on the couch. Billy couldn’t get out of the house without those.

“Those are my old basketball shorts,” comments Steve, pushing all the remaining toast in his mouth and chewing grossly on it. He’s suddenly so hungry, needs to be doing something, anything. He can tell they’re his by the way the bright green almost shines in the light peeking through the kitchen windows. He can’t see Billy’s face, though.

Billy does not answer, just opens the fridge and looks inside. Steve can then study his face, it looks drained, just like Steve’s surely does. Billy grabs a big bottle of water and chugs directly from it; Steve can’t bring himself to be annoyed, it’s only the two of them there.

He’s lost for words and figures Billy doesn’t mind the silence, especially when his nights are so tormented.

Billy puts the bottle back, bites down on a piece of cheese Steve was saving just in case he felt like cooking Italian and looks at Steve, fridge open so that the orange glow coming from inside hits Billy’s cheeks and chin only, the rest invisible. Steve thinks it’s the perfect metaphor for Hargrove.

He does not avoid the gaze, not even when the typical mean grin appears as the umpteenth deformation of his face. He goes away like he arrived, silently and unexpectedly.

And Steve rubs his palms against his face, forcefully enough to wake up completely and face his favorite day of the year. 

Jim is not pleased to hear about Murray, he doesn’t feel comfortable with locking kids up and Steve figures it must be about El. Feels guilty shortly after for even saying anything, but Hopper guarantees him it will not happen again, just like he did with Billy.

He then runs to the edges of Hawkins, the warmth of the day unexpected. At some point he takes off his sweater and t-shirt, secures them around his waist without stopping running. Steve lets the sun kiss his skin and takes back some more lost summer, while he thinks about his mother calling to wish him a good Halloween, the night before. When she’d asked if he would dress up as Fonzie again, he’d answered yes.

It had felt so good pretending to be the little kid she left home, without a worry in the world, if not how to conquer Nancy’s heart.

When he gets back, there’s a third vehicle lurking around his house. It’s the doctors’, but getting in he just sees Jim Hopper.

“Hey, Hop.”

“Steve,” he says back. He’s eating a donut with a ton of icing sugar and half of it is on Jim’s mustache. He looks over at Steve’s sweaty chest and finishes the donut in one bite, with a grin. “Looks like it’s gym day for all of us.”

Steve laughs, the feeling weird in his throat, as if he’s remembering just now the lyrics of an old song he hasn’t heard in years. It’s fucking sad, that’s what it is. “How’s...” he points at the ceiling, not knowing how to call the daily visits of the doctors. He doesn’t really know what happens.

Jim shrugs, “Usual shit, the shrink’s here too.”

Steve sits next to Jim, does not feel comfortable going upstairs to take a shower when Billy is probably not having that much fun. “He has nightmares,” Steve gets out, is aware Jim already knows and it’s confirmed when Jim’s face gets sad. “He screams like mad, I have to bang on the door to make him stop.”

Jim pats twice on his naked shoulder, a bear trying to show empathy how he can. It makes Steve raise a corner of the mouth. He sometimes wishes his father was more like him. Present, caring, brave. He then feels stupid, but it’s okay, really.

Billy has to have one or two things about his father, too, Steve is sure. 

“When El visited him, I mean, you know,” Jim shakes a hand over his head and Steve nods, “She came back shocked, the only thing she always said after was that she was so sorry for him. That he shouldn’t have saved her. Which is bullshit, but you know, his head must be pretty fucked up for her to say that.”

Steve is not surprised; he just knows he can’t and never will comprehend deeply what that means. He is selfishly relieved when he thinks it’s not his place to understand Billy.

“I told her that she saved him back, but she’s so stubborn,” the Sheriff’s eyes soften, Steve is drawn toward that kind of love: unconditional. “Keeps pressing me to let him see Max, but—“

“You should,” interrupts Steve, he doesn’t know where that came from. He just—he knows it’s not a good idea. But Billy probably wants to see her badly. “Not right now. But soon, maybe.”

Jim is surprised, but does not protest, seems to be considering, instead. “Yeah, all right, I’ll talk to Owens,” he concedes, then goes on, “How is all of this turning out for you, anyway?”

Steve thinks about it, he cannot recall what he expected before Billy arrived, but he cannot complain so far. “I’m good,” he says, it’s the truth.

“You know you can—“

“Hop, I’m good. It’s fine,” he promises with a reassuring smile. Even though he doesn’t find any of this fine. Not one bit.

“All right,” he puts his hands up, his back erect. “Just remember to call me when you need something, okay?”

Steve thinks about his dad again, then falls in an easy conversation with Jim about what is El planning to do in the evening and Steve lingers in the familiarity of Hopper grunting out Mike’s name like it’s a curse.

At some point of the rant on young love Jim is letting out, Owens appears at the kitchen entrance. The air falls, Steve can almost see it, there’s nothing the calm expression of the doctor can do to change it. “We’re done, guys.”

Hopper stands up, Steve wants to ask something, but doesn’t; he thinks the slightly dropped shoulders of Owens are enough of an indicator. Billy’s not improving, Steve feels like it’s him not getting better. Owens and Hopper too, he can tell.

They lurk on the door and talk, Steve does not eavesdrop nor wants to. His mind is stuck on Billy’s face that morning, how it looked like the Billy at school a few months ago, just thinner and paler. Steve cannot phantom knowing what’s under it.

He wonders if the Mind Flayer is a constant thought for Billy, if those 'No' he was screaming are the only evident sign of something he usually keeps to himself, bottled up under layers of pride, just like Steve. They come out only when the guard is down, while asleep.

Steve thinks mulling over these bad feelings will never erase them, Billy needs a distraction.

This is why, that late afternoon, when the warm sunlight has become a memory and there’s only an acid yellow painting the clouds, Steve knocks on his bedroom’s door. “Billy?”

No answer.

Steve tries again and conquers a “Fuck off already, Harrington.”

Since he’s not known for being easily impressionable, a third knock echoes in the empty house. A bit less so, now. 

The door opens and there stands Billy, his face is inexpressive but Steve can see his fingers twitch by his side, like he needs to hit something, Steve most probably. The dark consideration that he could and Steve would take it without fighting back, even if he could, is dangerous in so many ways Steve can’t deal with all of them. He opts for throwing one of his warm hoodies at Billy’s chest and saying, “Put it on,” before proceeding down the corridor.

Billy stares at the red fabric and then, to Steve’s surprise, he obliges. Maybe he rightly links it to a free exit. Well, more or less.

They walk to the foldable ladder hidden in the ceiling hatch; Steve pulls it down and the screech it lets out feels a lot like home in summers, he and his dad’s bird watching that was really an excuse to be on—

“The roof?” Billy is skeptical. Steve thinks that’s the best way to describe him, a bundle of mistrust. And Steve loves lost causes. “That’s pretty inconsiderate of you, Harrington, your surviving skills are shit.”

Steve groans, “You comin’ or not?”

Billy looks at the dark hole the open hatch leaves and sighs, “Whatever,” then starts climbing up, brushing over Steve’s shoulder like he’s not there at all. Steve follows suit, he half smiles because whatever must be Billy’s most used word.

They sit on the tiles, watch as the sun finally sets, the cold yellow becomes a warm blue and Steve needs a smoke. 

“I have a basketball net, back in the yard if you want to, uhm,” Steve is surprised by his own voice, listens to it carefully as it rants because he genuinely doesn’t know where it will bring. It’s an awful and super embarrassing place he tells himself he does not care about. “Yeah.”

Billy does not look at him, stares out at the trees. “I can’t get out,” he just says, it’s not sad or melancholic, it’s how it is. Billy is stating facts. Like a fact is that Steve feels awkward, sitting there on his roof with Billy Hargrove some feet away, in his clothes. Robin would laugh at him.

“I’ll tell nobody,” Steve stupidly touches his sweater where his heart his, as if he wants to draw a cross there. Billy tsks loudly, his eyes shift down to his lap, legs sprawled with no care, when Steve knows there’s a lot of that under the light buzzcut. At least, he hopes so. It would mean Billy can still be saved, in some way.

The topic drops, but he catches Billy quickly looking at him with more than hatred or pure indifference. Steve thinks it’s something, doesn’t know himself what his goal is.

“That cop,” starts Billy.

“Hop,” helps Steve, immediately regrets talking over a genuine input from Billy. Steve has been walking on eggshells for the past two days and, he has to admit, it’s fucking tiring as it is necessary. Maybe.

“Who died?” 

The question is not clear, what does Billy want to know? How could he tell someone died in Hopper’s life? How can he—

“His daughter,” Steve says, now it’s him looking at the couple of birds floating in front of them. “Sarah was her name. She was seven and she had cancer.”

He literally cannot stop talking, spilling Jim’s personal information like it’s not an interned patient of the wicked clinic of Dr. Owens listening. Like it’s not Billy.

He attempts a look over at Billy, he is not sure what he expects, maybe some human reaction, a ‘must suck, man’ but Billy does not provide any of that. He stays there, breathes, takes in the information peacefully, like he knew all along.

“How did you...?”

“The soup,” Billy says enigmatically. No more comments are given and Steve catalogues it as the hundredth mystery about Hargrove in his head. One thing he knows, though, the empathy showing from Billy’s interest in Jim is good. Perhaps he will stop screaming in his sleep for a while.

Steve would ask him what he exactly sees in his dreams, but he knows it would end with him falling to the ground. With a broken nose too, probably.

Suddenly, Steve perceives the shift in the atmosphere, the boy beside him is a bundle of nerves, unused energy, of the dark kind. The type of electricity that derives from panic and terror. Trauma. The type of things Vietnam did to people, Steve links.

He’s looking straight into the forest, the light almost completely gone. Steve knows he has to bring him back inside, where the night is blocked by the lights and the blinds Billy never opens. 

“You hungry, man?”

“Are you some kind of maid, Harrington?” it’s mocking and not nice and Steve laughs a bit.

“Yeah. The shittiest one, though. I can only make eggs and bacon, probably some overcooked pasta.”

Billy’s eyes are on him, he’s considering, Steve can tell. It’s that Billy thing where he throws back a bit his head, chin up and looks at you with challenging blue eyes. The context is so different from the school’s hallways and the showers. “Jesus, Harrington, you’re always so willing, someday you will get hurt.”

It should sound like a joke, Steve thinks by the grin on Billy’s heart-shaped lips, but it actually feels like a premonition. What Billy cannot imagine, though, is that Steve craves for it to happen. To hurt. Because it feels so sweet being the one trying his utter best but giving over all of his control to destiny, death even.

That’s why he does not answer and climbs back inside. He goes to the kitchen and starts putting pans on the fire. Billy follows him with his eyes, unapologetic.

“Why’s the pool in that state?” asks Billy from where he’s slowly whipping around in the moving stool at Steve’s counter.

Steve’s shoulders drop. Why is Billy making him talk about death? The pasta will be inedible. More than usual. He sighs and figures that, if it means Billy will have a simil-normal conversation with someone his age not writing down what he says and how he says it, Steve has to encourage it by saying the truth.

“Barbara Holland died in there.” 

He does not even try to be gentle, goes full in like Barb’s death had done for everyone of them. 

“What? You left some chick drown? That’s not nice,” Billy stings. 

“I was a stupid fuck,” he bites back, does not go on to explain he wasn’t actually by the pool, but in his very room getting it down with Nancy Wheeler. He doesn’t say it because it sounds like an excuse and Steve is done with those since Nancy looked at him like that, like Steve was not what the advertisement of a good boyfriend had promised. The fumes from the food and the warm light making the air hot and damp. “And she didn’t drown, anyway.”

He thinks there’s something in his voice while he says it, in the twitch of his fingers, that makes Billy stay silent after. By peeking at him in between pasta and tomato sauce, a bit of parmesan too because he misses his granny a lot, Steve can see how Billy’s arrogance has been tuned down and, for once, he wishes it didn’t happen.

Billy scans the dark outside the kitchen window, looks like he’s seeing what lurks there and cannot look away.

“Today’s Halloween,” says the first thing crossing his mind Steve. “A bunch of kids could come to our door. You have to stay behind, can’t be seen.” He loses himself a bit at the 'our' not so hidden in there.

“Yeah,” Billy gets out, in a whisper. 

They jump from a topic to the other, Steve’s a bit whiplashed.

“Where’re you parents, anyway, Harrington?” Billy goes, that mischievous grin plastered back on. 

Steve hates being put on the spot by Billy, always has, but figures it’s better like this than making Billy feel trapped. “My mom’s in Europe and my dad...” Steve shrugs. Last time he heard from him, three days ago, he was in a hotel in Connecticut, waiting for some meeting Steve didn’t care about. He had asked how work was and Steve had feigned enthusiasm, the kind he does not feel anymore because he’s so dull. “They’ll be back on Christmas,” he adds. Leaves out the ‘maybe’.

Steve keeps stirring the boiling water, eyeing the pasta moving with it like it holds the secret for a serene existence.

“They probably will get you some place before that, anyway.”

It’s Billy’s turn to shrug, the whatever in each of his movements. Intense blue follows Steve as he plates their food. It looks undercooked, now, which is a start, Steve reasons. “I’ll fuck off before that.”

Steve thinks he hasn’t tried getting away once, thinks Billy is actually afraid of the forest like he is. He thinks, but says nothing, just asks “Where do you plan on going?” like they’re talking holidays or colleges over a plate of perfect pasta.

Billy eats the first bite and, if he hates it, it’s not clear because his face is not giving away a single thing. At least, the restlessness has left his shoulders and he looks human again, tiny even. Hungry, because he takes big forkfuls after that first one. “I can’t tell you, you’d be too tempted to follow me.”

“Why would I do that?” Steve arches an eyebrow.

“To get out of this shithole.”

Steve—he reckons he would run off, hit the road and never come back. He figures his parents would take too much to notice; he’d be in Mexico or Canada. Maybe Europe like his mother. “Fair enough,” he concedes.

The doorbell then rings and Steve looks immediately at Billy, blue darts looking back, feigning indifference but actually startled. 

When Steve opens the door there are three girls, they may be ten or something, dressed as the Charlie’s Angels and Steve smiles at them, goes pick up all the sweets he’s taken at the shop the day before to fill their pumpkins. He loves Halloween so much. Well, loved.

Billy has finished his pasta by the time he’s back and he is wandering in the living room, looking at photos, touching things with no care of being seen. 

Steve shots glances at his pillow, checking if the keys are visible. They aren’t and he leans on the wall, watches Billy as he watched a tiger in a New York zoo when he was little. The same awe, the same respect and a hint of apprehension. Billy paces around with his shoulders up, never turns completely his back to Steve.

Steve thinks about how Billy was able to read Jim’s deepest pain, wonders if the black in his eyes’ pupils can dig his own too. If he sees the way he couldn’t sleep for days after that first night at the Byers’. How Steve turns on all the lights in that big house when he feels that they could flicker, maybe Barbara trying to tell him she’s still in that pool.

Nancy had whispered what she’d seen in the Upside Down, when she went into the forest with Jonathan. Steve thought, later, that it must have been a, as creepy, version of the tunnels he found himself into with the toddlers. The smell had stuck with him even when it actually went away. Sometimes Steve snaps his head to the side, sure it invaded his nostrils again, for a split second.

But Billy just stops at the window and stares some more in the dark, probably watching closely the agents’ cars parked on the side of the road. 

Someone rings again, exactly when Steve was starting to feel at ease in that silence. He looks at Billy, figures that he can stay where he is because nobody at the door could see him there.

Steve quickly grabs the keys from under the pillow when Billy turns his attention back outside. Caution is the actual key, Steve is learning.

He expects a “Trick or treat?”, has already the candies in one hand. 

He’s greeted by a white sheet with two holes where the eyes should be and a Captain Hook. The Captain has a fake goatee and his hook is probably the bent body of a spoon. His hair is a flashing red.

They’re inside before Steve can link all the dots. He remains silent, on the door, like an asshole. Then, he glances at the cars and closes the door. He reaches the two short figures, plastering himself in front of them before they can get into the living room and Steve’s house blows up with pure chaos. 

“Hey, no. No, no, no.”

Max lifts her eyepatch and deadpans him. “Steve.”

Steve rushes them away from the living room entrance, gains only a few steps, but hopes it’s enough for Billy not to notice the two girls. He drops the plastic bag of sweets, lays his hands on their shoulders, tries to communicate how bad this idea is. 

A lot.

“You have to go away before someone finds out. You could get into a shit ton of trouble,” he whispers. He looks straight into the ghost’s eyes, hoping El gets it. A bit, in some weird way, like she always gets things. “Girls, seriously.”

He probably won’t have kids, too damaged to find serenity in something so usual, where he has found the pale image of it himself. And looking at these stubborn kids he thinks he definitely won’t have kids.

“I have to see him,” Max hisses, her voice low still and Steve appreciates the effort but does not. “El said—“

“No,” he cuts her off, squeezes her thin shoulder. Steve feels hot in his sweater, all the calories of his, now cold, pasta hitting him like a punch. “Owens and Hopper will tell you when it’s okay to visit. It’s too soon now, nobody is mentally prepared. Until then, you go home and cause some other trouble.”

Max crosses her arms and the white shirt moves with her, the puffy sleeves make Steve smile a bit. He remembers being Captain Hook himself, only a handful of years ago. “Steve,” she says again, maybe thinking his name will pour in him some sense.

“Max,” he serves back, looks swiftly behind his shoulders to check if Billy’s getting on something.

Eleven finally takes off the sheet, Steve scolds her without saying a word, uses the expression he always gets with Dustin when he puts himself down or makes an harsh comment about something he cannot fully comprehend, even with that brain of his. He knows it’s all her doing, she’s localized Billy with her powers and Max has come up with this incredibly effective plan of feigning being two normal girls looking for candy not to look suspicious.

He’s subtly impressed and not surprised, proud of them. But he obviously has to babysit the shit out of them and be the bad cop.

“He’s not ready, Max,” Steve explains, because it’s true. Billy’s playing with Steve, they exchange some words, now, on the third night, but they’re superficial for the most part; Billy does not care about Steve. He’s dancing around the jailer, distracting him. In a way he never did when they were at basketball practices. There, Billy Hargrove was a tank, passed over anyone’s cold body to get the score. But Steve recognizes tactics when he sees it.

Max nearly stomps her boot down. Eleven looks behind Steve, like she knows, but doesn’t say anything.

“How do you know that? You don’t even like him,” Max spits. And—she’s right, he doesn’t like Billy, never really has. But now he has a task, one he can actually help with and he empathizes with the poor sod. They’re both prisoners of what life threw at them.

Steve sighs, drops his head down to his stupid sneakers, thinks he should definitely buy a new pair. 

“I’ll tell Dustin you ditched him on purpose,” she chews out, looks sure from the nose down, a bit guilty in the light blue irides, similar to Billy’s but less burdened.

Steve pictures Henderson’s sad pout, that look he gives occasionally when he’s not having his way. Then says, “Whatever” in a Billy-esque fashion.

“He needs some space,” Steve tells them, looks again at El. She should know what space feels like on your skin. He avoids telling them how he has to lock him down, for now. Max would flip and Steve couldn’t even blame her. “Look, it’s complicated and you have to make them do their work. They’ll help him.”

He hopes.

“He will have to come home at some point,” Max retorts. “I have to see him before his dad does.”

Her eyes are so stern, angry. They make Steve angry too, nobody should know that type of fear, let alone a fourteen-year-old girl. She shouldn’t be wanting to see Billy before his father tries to destroy him again. He shouldn’t.

“Don’t worry, Max. Hop will take care of that, too.”

Again, it’s a hope and nothing more. But Eleven looks strained by that topic and Steve has to let it fall, takes them a bit more toward the door, even scoops a good amount of candies in both their brown bags.

“Now, please. Please, go.” 

They’re at the door, Steve opens it and rushes them out.

“You were there when he woke up, Steve,” says Max, he can tell she remembers vividly the terror in the air by the way Captain Hook has never looked so small. “And he calmed down when he heard my voice.”

“Yes,” he just answer. He looks in the night and ponders how he should get them somewhere safer than a dark isolated road. 

Eleven speaks for the first time and it’s just Max’s name. A warning as she tugs her elbow. 

Max ignores her, “He was screaming and then he stopped!” she nearly screams. Her eyes are so wide and watery, Steve feels bad. He gives El the whole bag of candies.

She just repeats Max’s name, more urgently.

“It’s dangerous. He is.”

“We were so bad to him. All of us. Billy’s never been dangerous!” 

Steve goes to close the door with a hissed, “Things change.”

All of a sudden, from behind him, Billy’s voice comes as a loud whisper. “Maxine.”

Oh. So that’s what El was trying to tell the other girl. That Billy was there, that he was listening. And Steve has to act quickly.

“Billy!” Max shouts, pushes Steve back in, does not succeed. “Bil—“

“Go. Now! Wait for me by the agents’ car. I’ll take you home.”

Finally, the door shuts. He and Billy are again alone. The cold wind outside is still there and Billy seems to breathe it in as fast as he can. His nostrils gulp it down like fresh water in a desert, the calm stance he’s feigned up until now crumbles at his feet, Steve can tell the rage he’s letting out will do no good.

“Billy.”

The boy is on him before Steve can see him coming. He grabs Steve by the sweater and slams him against the door, like Steve has seen him do at school, to younger, more scared guys. Tommy H. multiple times, too. But Steve is not a timorous teenager, he’s seen real monsters, Billy only adds up.

“Why the fuck is she here?” he spits, his face so near to Steve’s he can feel the tomato sauce in his breath.

Steve does not fight back, stays calm; he knows reacting with a tiger is stupid. “She’s here to see you.”

As he’s saying that, Max starts to bang on the door, ring the doorbell, shout Billy’s name. The sounds make Billy flinch, his grip falters a bit on Steve, but his eyes never leave him, where they meet at the same height. “You fucking idiots told her I’m here.” It’s not a question.

“I didn’t,” Steve’s tone is calm, even if the bangs on the door make his skin itchy with the possible danger of the two siblings meeting. Billy doing something harmful because he’s a wounded animal and shock is too much. Steve has to protect them at all costs, so he looks back at Billy, lips a straight line. “El told her. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it, but you have to let me go bring them back home.”

Steve’s head knocks on the wood of the door again, harder. He fists his hands at his sides and tells himself he will go punch some wall when the situation is calmer. Because Steve is becoming fidgety. He doesn’t like how Billy could beat him easily before all of that happened. Now Billy’s weaker, tired, but his fire is burning strong and he almost bites at Steve’s neck because he’s so near.

“Maxine. Cannot. Come. Again.”

Steve is shocked now, those bitten out words confuse him more than Billy’s aggressivity. What is Billy trying to say? Steve has taken for granted that he’d want to see his sister. “W-What?”

“She stays the fuck away from here or I’ll go. That’s the deal, Harrington.”

Steve puts his hand on Billy’s, tries to untangle his fingers to break free, but Billy is not moving, watching closely Steve like he has the cars outside. Probably the Mind Flayer’s victims, too. He is waiting.

Max keeps screaming and kicking the door, none of them registers it.

Steve nods, “Yeah, I’ll bring her home.”

That’s how Billy lets him go, slowly, not dropping his gaze. His jaw is clenched and the buzzcut makes his face look harsher, not the typical angelic boy for whom all the mothers in Hawkins have their panties hot. 

They stay like that, staring each other down. Steve tries to stand straight and communicate trustworthiness, Billy judges it, angry in his uncertainness. Then, Steve thinks that Billy can threaten leaving all he wants, but knows better. He hasn’t got a plan, not yet. To get out, to survive in the trees. But Steve, at the same time, does not want to instigate a faster process of plotting in him.

Steve grabs the knob of the door and Billy follows his movements. “Tell her I don’t fucking want to see her.” 

Steve nods. He won’t. 

Billy flies up the stairs in less than three seconds, like he’s been burnt, the door of Steve’s room slams behind him. Steve sighs, feeling Billy’s eyes on him still, he meets Max and El again.

Worst Halloween ever.  
~

Billy is dangerous, now more than ever. He knows that, but hearing it coming from Steve Harrington’s lips sent a rush down his spine. It felt good to know King Steve deems him dangerous. Not just some homeless fucker using his hot water.

Not that he cares, but still. He wants respect from Harrington.

Pretends, for his pride’s sake, that he’s not heard Max say Steve was there with her when Billy woke up in the clinic. He might dwell on that later, when the nerves in his arms and hands stop yelling to hit hit hit.

He’s too worked up, needs to calm down before the dark thoughts set in for good. He stupidly forgot for some minutes about it, drunk in fresh air and homemade horrible food. It almost reminded of his nights alone with his mother on the West Coast. When Neil was passed out in some bar and they could just be before the storm kicked the door open once again.

He shuts the door behind him with a loud noise, leans on it, pushing hard his palms in his eye-socks, to the point of feeling it in his brain, an awakening jolt of pain. He wants to scream. 

When his hands drop, he does not ponder too much on their wet skin, just brushes Steve’s sleeves’ fabric on his eyes, hoping his tears will stain it but knowing they won’t. He takes it off and throws it against the wall, where he then starts punching. It hurts his knuckles, makes more tears form as nerves frizzle up to his shoulders, begging him to stop.

Billy does only when red appears on the stupid Genesis poster Harrington has put there.

Max cannot be near him. She can’t. 

She should be far, far away from there, from Hawkins in general. Billy and his father mean pain, they ruin everything they touch and Susan and her daughter are no exception. He’s never accepted his mother’s replacement; at first, Billy thought that she would come back and find Susan filling her place. Then, when Billy started going out to drink with older guys, he just plain hated them, the women in his life that meant Billy had to converge all of Neil’s violence.

And Maxine is annoying as fuck. She skates around, gets herself into stupid troubles he has to fix. He knows Neil wouldn’t land a hand on her, but he also doesn’t. He did with his mother, he did with him when he was younger. He probably has with Susan, too. But Billy meanly thinks she called for it by marrying the most fucked up man on Earth.

Billy grins slightly and looks at his bloody hands while he considers having beaten Neil at that. Neil, at least, has never killed anyone. He stops before, not way before, but still.

Steve’s words make no sense to Billy. Who the fuck is El? And how do they know where Billy is? The fear of being too out in the open doesn’t ask permission to spread across his arteries, but Billy’s so used to it he welcomes the feeling like an old friend. 

Billy falls asleep on the floor, the smell of Steve’s stupid cologne in his nose because the sweater is a perfect pillow for his banging head.

When he sees the eyes of all the people he has killed march in front of him, he’s not surprised. They’re old friends, as well. They look at him, but don’t see Billy. They look up at him, he’s tall. He’s thirty feet in the humid basement of an abandoned factory. 

Rats squeak like mad all around, some explode in a pulp made of meat and bones, then crawl toward him. And Billy knows it’s wrong when he feels powerful, satisfied by all the sorrow he’s caused. But he does. Smiles in his sleep while he wants to scream for them to go away. 

At the end of the line, Max stands with her red hair. She’s scared, he can see that, but does not care. She’s been wanting to see him and now she is. He’s glad she feels frightened, because he’s dangerous.

He wants to tell her to go away, but he just smiles where he’s planted on the wet floor. 

He feels he’s dreaming, but the disgusting sounds of people exploding at his feet, becoming part of him, is so real. Billy prays internally for this hell to end before all of them are dead and he can feel their limbs moving as his own. The last two nightmares he’s had had, actually, but tonight he doesn’t feel as lucky.

Screams but can’t hear his voice. He’s not there. Heather is, Max is, everyone else too. They willingly melt into red and black ponds.

The doctor expects him to say all the things he sees while asleep, like they’re fake, like they never happened. He wants Billy to bare himself and trust. 

Not happening.

Max gets near him, the line moving as people pool in front of him. Billy is going to ruin Max too, and he will love it if that is a sensation it is able to feel. If Billy is.

The subjugation moving him is so strong, he reckons he would die for the cause, he has to destroy more and more. Until every single living being stops breathing and becomes part of him. Then, he will be finished. And he has to start with that girl that closed his gate.

Billy can’t hurt her, but it can and will.

Max is the third left on her feet, her freckled face stares up at him and Billy hates the trust under all that fear, despises how she takes tentative steps toward him. Like she mouths his name. 

He tries to yell at her to go away. 

I’m not Billy. Things change, Maxine.

But it feels too good as yet another person melts into him, then another. He feels their heartbeats in him, joining his to beat louder but an actual heart cannot be found there.

When Maxine takes her last stride in his direction, she falls to her knees and her limbs and face melt for him, with his name on her rosy lips. 

Billy is so sorry.

He wakes up right after Max has disappeared in front of him. 

Billy spends the next days in Harrington’s room. Tries to keep occupied with the guitar, the shitty books and even listens to Alphaville and moans about it to himself.

He eats what Owens brings him because he can’t have Harrington come up to his room and try talk to him about what happened. He feels the sting of anger every time he pictures Harrington’s face against the wall, how he did not look worried about being hurt.

And that had made Billy’s blood boil. Nobody sustains Billy’s gaze when he rattles them around, nobody ever does. Even the bravest startles a bit, at least reacts and throws punches, ones that Billy takes like a real pro. And then it’s his moment to attack, to let it all out because he can’t really hit Neil in the face, so someone else has to get it for Billy to settle.

Harrington had stayed there, keeping the door shut even with Billy snarling at him. He had looked perplexed only when Billy talked about the deal he wanted to make. When he asked for Max to never come back there. 

Billy was so near, Harrington’s hairspray was all over, making his head feel dizzy with it. He had looked at the other guy’s lips while he was talking back to better grasp what he was saying. Their cherry red was ridiculous and Billy had hated him even more. 

Billy hates things kept from him. Like that Sinclair boy hanging around Maxine, or the current location of his mother. Steve Harrington still looks, after all the things they know, like he has somewhere else to be. 

He is strumming the chords of the dusty instrument and suddenly jolts up when he hears Harrington coming back home. Shushes away the memory of him letting Max come in like an idiot just because he could start punching Phil Collins all over again.

“Jesus fuck,” he gets out before opening the door and going down the stairs.

Steve Harrington is in the entrance with his stupid tall hair, Billy thinks the ceiling is so high up because of it. Looks at the center of Harrington’s face, at his long greek nose, since he could snap by looking at his fish-like expression.

“Hi,” Harrington greets him with no enthusiasm and Billy thinks it’s easier if they don’t fake interest in each other’s presence.

Billy does not answer, sizes him up. His brain going instinctively into fight mode, considers he could take Harrington down with him in no time. He’s a couple centimeters taller, but Billy’s bulkier. Plus, he’s almost knocked him dead once, at that weird kid’s house.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yes.”

Steve nods and looks some more at him, then walks past Billy into the kitchen.

“Who’s George?” Billy asks because he’s been closed in a room for three days and he’s imbecile like that. He has to stop running his mouth, Neil would tell him that too.

Steve gulps down half a bottle of water and then looks at his bordeaux uniform like he’s noticing now he has it on. “He used to work at the Supermarket, my boss could not care enough to give me a new one.”

Billy honestly does not care, but nods once anyway because he’s trying to get some answers. Now that he’s calmed down he can proceed building the picture of the rabbit-hole that is Hawkins.

“And who’s El?” he asks, stands awkwardly in the doorway because he hates asking people things he doesn’t know. It makes him feel so stupid. Billy does not owe shit to anyone.

Steve arches an eyebrow and drinks some more. Fucker.

“Are you gonna punch me to some wall?”

“C’mon, Harrington, can you not take some action once in a while? Didn’t little Becky Wheeler show you her affection?” Billy laughs. This he can do, joking and being an asshole about embarrassing things that shouldn’t have happened. 

“Nancy,” sighs Steve, but he doesn’t look offended or anything, only a bit tired. He has dark circles Billy barely notices because he has them too, all the time. But Harrington’s skin is overall lighter and it’s impossible not to. “Her name’s Nancy.”

Billy blocks a ‘whatever’ because he wants to know.

“Come outside with me, will you?” asks him Steve. He then proceeds toward the back yard, unlocks it with the keys and gets out. 

And Billy—Billy is scared. 

There’s the forest, in front of the garden. It’s midday, but it doesn’t really matter. There are clouds all over the sky, reminding him that not always it has to be about burning hot sun. 

And he can’t look like a right idiot, not in front of Harrington that already brushes him off to do other things.

The trees look healthy and still, so he guesses it’s fine. Harrington is there too, with him. He wouldn’t die alone, which is the best he can aspire to right now.

His first steps outside feel like a cold shower, it’s a bit overwhelming, really. Billy almost cannot remember the multitude of sounds and things to see in the open world. He hates Steve Harrington for asking him to do it. He thanks him too, in his mind.

Harrington sits on a lounger and lights up a smoke. Billy stands there, looks around frantically. But it’s just them and the wind amid the falling leafs. His head feels cold as he can’t stop looking at the bright orange of the bottom of the cigarette between Harrington’s lips.

The pool also is covered in leafs, they float like boats on the Californian sea. Billy wants to dive in and forget the world, bets the water is nicely freezing. He would hold his breath until his lungs couldn’t take it no more. And then he would hold it some more.

“You want a cigarette?”

The sound Billy makes is embarrassing, it makes Harrington grin. But he doesn’t comment on it, he just helps Billy light it up. Billy opts for the chair near Harrington and slouches into it like this isn’t the thing that scares him the most.

The dark smoke running in his throat helps a little.

He waits for Harrington to start explaining, but the boy keeps staring at the pool, considering. His skin looks paler in its reflections, if possible.

“So, El,” pressures Billy. His foot is thumping quickly on the concrete and he’d rather keep his voice to the minimum because the forest might hear him. 

Steve snaps out of his trance, his elbows on the knees like the weight of his body is too much. Or he has to puke. Billy thinks it could be either or both.

“Eleven is the girl that opened the Gate to the Upside Down the first time,” Steve starts. It sounds like he’s explained it a hundred times, words void of meaning. But for Billy they’re outrageous, on the verge of unacceptable. He shuts up and smokes, though, listens with his eyes on Harrington. “She’s Hopper’s adoptive daughter now. Her father used to keep her in the Labs to do experiments on her.”

“Experiments?” Billy stands up, he has to pace up and down the poolside or he’ll go nuts.

Harrington nods, lights up another cigarette as he smashes the old one with a heel. “She has...some skills, like, she does stuff with her mind.”

Billy wouldn’t believe it, he would laugh at Harrington and tell him to fuck off, maybe kick his obnoxious face in the pool’s water. But the thing is, Billy takes what Harrington says for the absolute truth, he cannot bring himself to doubt his words when he’s been in the head of a giant alien spider, going around burning things to the ground.

“Like what?” Billy’s eager, he can tell it himself. For once he does not hide it and just leans a bit toward Harrington, because he knows it’s not something you scream in the forest. Even at midday.

“She can move things, heavy ones too. And she finds people,” Harrington whispers, his eyes land on Billy’s in a conspiratory atmosphere broken only by the slow walk of an agent a few meters away. 

The man stops in his track and eyes Billy. He brings his hand to the walkie talkie and speaks in it, all dark suit and sunglasses. It reminds Billy of the driver he tried to get to kill him. 

Nice.

“Agent, it’s fine!” half shouts Harrington, making Billy snort loudly. He does not need a fucking baby-sitter.

“Yeah, fucker, does it look like a subtle escape to you?” he adds, a huge grin while his cigarette dangles between his lips. “Motherfucking idiot,” he adds, muttering. 

He hears Harrington sniffle a light laugh, low and raspy, while he apologizes with a gesture to the infuriated man in black. He would probably kill Billy if it wasn’t for the walkie talkie at his belt cracking out some orders. To which the guard dog obeys with a grimace.

“Yeah, go lick Reagan’s ass or something!”

“Jesus, Billy,” Harrington reprimands him, but it’s with a loud sneer again. And Billy feels content with how the usual mean comments running on his tongue entertain King Steve. Billy’s his joker and he’s fine with it, for now.

The guard takes a step toward Billy, making repressed excitement bubble alive in his tissues, wanting to push the man on the moist grass with the plant of his boot. It would make him feel a tad more alive. But the man leaves it, stomps forward until he disappears behind Harrington’s house.

“You reckon they will never crawl back into their hole?” Billy asks the other young man. They look like friends hanging by the pool, talking life and useless stuff. It feels nice, even with the trees staring at him.

Harrington shrugs, takes another drag of his cigarette. And silence falls again as Billy takes in what he’s just being said about telekinetic and hound’s powers.

“She found me,” he realizes it as he speaks, “This girl saw me here and told Maxine.”

Harrington pets his own hair, nods. “She’s ace at that.”

“Making shit difficult?” Billy arches a dark blond eyebrow. Frowns at the almost finished cigarette.

Harrington lifts the corner of his mouth and Billy can read a shit ton of affection in his brown eyes while he says “That too, yeah. But really, El’s our secret weapon against...”

“Yeah,” intercepts Billy. He gets why Harrington avoids repeating the whole thing. He must sense the trees are too near, too. Maybe, under their old roots, the tunnels it used to dig are still pulsing with death. “Yeah.”

“Hop has kept her in the woods for nearly a year to hide her from her asshole father’s team of creeps,” Harrington’s eyes flicker some at that, drop to Billy’s spread hands over the chair’s handles and Billy ignores it. He’s not sure Harrington is referring to the psychopath torturing him with their needles and questions or to Neil.

He then decides for the former because Billy can’t phantom the idea of Harrington knowing his best kept secret. Can’t hear him hesitate to mention a fucking horrible father because Billy can handle that in so many ways Brat Spoiled Harrington cannot even count.

“Do you know where he is?”

Harrington clicks his tongue, plays with the ashes of his second smoke by cramming them on the sloucher between his spread tights. The shirt of his uniform looks absolutely ridiculous, but Billy thinks it suits the character just fine. Him and his joke attires at work. He remembers the first time at the Stardust Mall, when he’d passed in front of Scoops Ahoy where he saw Harrington air trumpeting, to some girl’s horror, in a sailor uniform.

He’d lingered and made a mental note of taking the piss at the first good occasion. Which never came.

“Brenner’s dead,” Harrington informs him. “Was eaten alive by one of those...dogs.”

Billy throws his roach in the water and looks attentively as it floats on a red leaf. Harrington does not even see him doing it, too deep in his thoughts about monster dogs. Billy knows what he refers to, he has seen memories of flower-faced canids, he’s felt protected by them. They were his army and would die to keep him alive.

Owens’ scars appear to him, too.

Billy does not voice any of that because he wants to avoid Harrington passing out before he’s finished with his questions. 

“How does she do that? Are there others like Eleven?” the name tastes weird on his tongue, ridiculous. So he grabs Harrington’s pack of cigarettes from the floor where he’s put it and takes another one out without asking.

Harrington tightens his shoulders in the thin striped fabric, he’s cold but does not attempt to get inside. Billy reckons he wants to feel as numb as currently possible. “She has a place where she goes with her mind. She describes it as a black, huge room.”

Billy thinks about Max dressed up for Halloween again, the way her red hair is recognizable from miles apart, accentuated by the white of the sheet covering the other kid with her. Who, he hopes for her fucking sake, is not Lucas Sinclair.

“And she’s found only another one like her. Name’s Kali and she’s number Eight,” Harrington starts rubbing absentmindedly his arms to keep warm. “But she came back and closed the Gate.”

It’s like Billy gets pushed in the cold water. The cigarette falls from his lips and he can hear it meet the cement. He’s frozen in the pool chair, eyes wide on Harrington because this, Billy cannot believe.

Eleven closed its Gate. And she opened it. 

The familiar feeling of rage spinning his head and vision invades him. He registers Harrington talking to him, but doesn’t listen to a word, while he gets up and goes back inside where the fucking forest cannot see him having a breakdown. Where Harrington cannot receive his anger.

He’s glad he doesn’t follow Billy inside, then up the stairs. It makes him feel less chased and a bit more in control when all he can think about is this girl who ruined his life and then pissed it off. Badly.

He clearly remembers having to find the girl who had closed the passage, having to bring her to the monster because it was too dangerous having her going around. They had to end her life, make her part of the cause. Billy knows he had wanted her to die quickly, immediately, because he couldn’t take the threat a second more. 

Billy sits on Harrington’s unmade bed and dives his face in his hands. Wants to scream but only bites down on his skin because he’s not letting out in the open how wrecked he feels.

Eleven was the one who opened and closed the Gate. And she had her father making experiments on her in the Labs. Billy remembers her voice from somewhere, even if he can’t pinpoint exactly where. He knows something happened the night he almost died and doesn’t like it. 

Billy hates when things are kept from him, but hates it even more when it’s his own mind doing the keeping.

“Shit.”

Maybe he should find a gun, no point in trying to run away when what’s in his head will follow anyway. When, looking down, he’ll see all the blood he’s taken. Because there are things, in the dark, that grab you and pull you under with them. No matter how hard you fight. Or hold onto the rusty railing of some basement steps.

Harrington leaves a plate of eggs and bacon for him in the hallway, in a tray on the floor. And Billy leaves it there.

When Owens will be back tomorrow he’ll tell him he wants to go back to the clinic, where Harrington does not go around cooking in his shitty shirt and can’t tell Billy the things he so desperately wants to know.  
~ 

Steve feels like seeing Robin. He hasn’t in days and his mood is so gloomy he could get drunk alone on the couch, to the point of knocking on his bedroom’s door before the screams even start.

“Oh, so you’re alive. Why the fuck don’t you answer my calls?” is how she says hi to him when he gets at the arcade. Greasy Keith is hovering in on the conversation because he’s that gross.

Steve apologizes, almost tells her he’s always outside when she calls, but knows better than lying to green haired Robin Buckley. He then puts his hands in the pockets of his jeans, he turns to Keith. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be, Keith?” Like a shower? he mentally adds but does not say because it would make him sound like Billy Hargrove and he doesn’t want to go there.

Keith stares at him from behind his bag of chips and then scoffs, walking away.

“I might go to jail within the next forty-eight hours for murder, bare with me,” his friend rolls her eyes.

Steve laughs a bit, climbs on the counter, knowing he’s been forgiven already. He fidgets with his black wristwatch, opening and closing the clasp. It’s a gift from his dad for making it through tenth grade.

“Stevie, what happened?” she asks, climbs on the counter right beside him. Nobody is in the shop anyway. 

Steve’s mind runs to blue eyes and cigarettes by the pool; it reminds him of the nightmares, the anger, the pain not so well hidden. Billy Hargrove happened.

But it’s not like Steve can spill federal secrets, so he just tells her how he hasn’t been sleeping soundly lately.

“Take some Xanax, what the hell,” Robin slaps lightly the back of his head, but then lays hers on his shoulder. “You also stink very much.”

“Green suits you,” answers Steve, instead.

She takes his hand and locks their fingers together. Steve thinks the touch soothes his edges just enough for his spine to relax. Similar souls get each other and Steve feels like he’s been clashing against everyone lately. Himself among others.

“Dustin called me to let you know that having a girlfriend does not mean you forget all about your friends.”

Her tone is mocking, but it’s actually her way to ask what he’s been up to lately. Steve cannot answer that either.

“Joyce Byers doesn’t need me to baby-sit anymore and I’m taking double shifts at the Market,” so he lies because Robin sounds like not only Dustin feels left out. He goes on and shifts the attention toward his friend, “Has Mary stopped by?”

Robin scoffs on his henley, “For shit she has! You have scared her away with your wreck ways with girls. Honestly, Steve, you suck.”

He laughs again and thinks he was the one actually scared by the girl with golden locks. “I’m just out of practice, Rob. And you shouldn’t be judging me, by the way.”

“Whatever,” she closes the topic, hops down to her feet and starts doing her work, going around the shop. “Can I come at yours for dinner, tonight, anyway?” she half shouts from behind the shelf. Even Keith hears it because he grunts, then starts muttering insults, probably toward Steve. 

Shit, no. “Mh,” he hesitates, what can he say that would sound plausible and wouldn’t backlash later? “I actually have to go visit my aunt. It’s her birthday, so, yeah. Sorry.”

It feels stupid lying to Robin, the only one that knows him well enough to respect his breakdowns and pull him out of them with a smile. His best friend, possibly the only one, along with Nancy, that really cares for him. Steve sometimes thinks he has wasted his early life running in circles with that douchebag of Tommy and his girl, Carol. Going to parties, realizing acquittances were his daily bread, no one close enough to turn to when he felt like an abandoned child. No one whispering their secrets in a public restroom. The deepest ones.

Paradoxically, Steve has to thank the Gate for opening and spitting out all that pain, because where it has destroyed, under the bones and the ashes, sometimes Steve can see the light it has brought. 

And he must be going mental if bullshitting Robin leads to him smiling a bit to himself, Billy forgotten in a box at the back of his brain. 

“Yeah, sure, no problem. Didn’t know you even had an aunt, Dingus,” it sounds like a question, but Steve just shrugs and turnes his palms up, as if he just has forgotten mentioning it.

He actually has an aunt, but she lives in Texas and he would be there for tomorrow’s dinner at best. He’s glad Robin does not question him anymore, something tells him she has sensed the lie, like blood in the water for a shark or for...other things. And he loves her.

She then starts telling him about the Halloween party and her new crush, some girl from out of town that Steve doubts Robin will meet ever again. He listens carefully , proceeds to ask a lot of questions; he’s really interested in what a normal person of his age does usually. He can’t bring himself to remember how he lived before. Before Billy, before the Gate, Nancy Wheeler.

When she’s done and she’s about to go off on this road trip she wants to do on her own to “Find my true self, Dingus,” Steve interrupts by asking if she has seen Max Mayfield recently.

“Nope, I figure she’s becomin’ a proper lady or something my granny would say. She was here last week but for like, three minutes. And with Lucas.”

Steve recalls her silence in the car drive back to her house. He’d tried explaining her and Eleven why they should never pop at his without telling him. Steve even said Billy needs time to clear his mind and Max’s presence would mess it up, even if he wants to see her. A lot. 

Yeah, he’s getting pretty good at lies.

“Why?” asks Robin, the case of Day of the Dead between her hands.

“Haven’t seen her in forever. Just wanted to check on her because of, you know.”

Robin sighs, shakes her green head some. “How’s her brother?”

“Not well,” and it’s the first sincere thing Steve says, it feels good for a moment as the ‘Billy’ box opens, then it doesn’t anymore. 

Robin must hear the off-tone of his voice because she gently brushes his knee when she passes again with another horror movie. “He was an asshole, but I’m sorry for him.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Billy would flip if he’d heard their pity spilling all over, but he’s locked in Steve’s room for some weird reason and he can’t. Steve thinks is something he’s said, when talking about Eleven and the Gate, but he does not get it. It was weird enough that Billy looked completely clueless about the girl and who she was when he literally gave his life for her; after trying to get her killed, of course.

“Does your aunt have a cat?” Robin asks after three seconds of nothing. She’s over Billy Hargrove in a way Steve almost envies. “I feel like that’s a aunt thing. Unmarried, too. Might be me in ten years, actually.”

Steve laughs with intention, sad thoughts are just a shadow in his eyes and his friend is too far to see it. 

“She wears large floral dresses, doesn’t she?”

He loves her.

When he turns the steering wheel on the road bringing to Max and Billy’s house, it’s not a coherent decision of his. He just does. 

The black of the asphalt lightens and becomes less smooth, rocks scattered all over in the thin dust the BMW raises. Houses leave place to trees as Steve thinks his and Billy’s trips to school are not as dissimilar as he’d imagine before giving rides to Max, among the others, became a thing.

He used to leave the girl a few good feet before becoming visible from the house windows. Max had asked him to do it and Steve had obliged ever since; he wouldn’t have her getting in trouble because of him. Now, as he approaches the house, he decides to park on the side of the wide road, before it gets narrower, and proceed by foot.

He checks the area, assuming that Billy’s father shouldn’t be there anyway, since it’s only four in the afternoon. He pays attention nonetheless, perhaps Susan is at home and she will tell her husband she saw a older guy sneak near their daughter’s bedroom.

He once overheard Lucas explaining Dustin how he got inside without Neil Hargrove noticing and, now, he follows his words, hidden by the trees near the forest clearing, then runs to the back left of the house and kneels under the window there. He’s surprisingly out of breath, thrilled by the danger of being caught because his life has been shut down after a complete shit storm and his legs are made to run, apparently.

Steve, nose up, peeks inside the room and exhales relieved when he spots a bunch of girly clothes and a skateboard on the floor. At least, it’s the right room. He’s lucky enough to see the silhouette of Max’s body near the mirror, she’s listening to something on her Walkman and dancing. By the look of it, Steve would bet it’s a rock and roll song.

He knocks on the glass, loud enough to make him cringe, but Max does not seem to notice at all as she starts spinning on the spot, loose hair flying everywhere. Steve smiles to himself, thinks how she never told Dustin about his white lie in the end and knocks again.

Fortuitously, Max registers his presence through the shadow on the floor, while pirouetting around. She gasps and takes off her big yellow headset with wide eyes. When she registers Steve’s features, open in an apologetic smile as he waves like a complete moron, she rolls her eyes up.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“I know, just wanted to know—how are you?” Steve scratches his head, at unease, standing there and talking with a barely teenage girl.

Max puffs, looks at him for a few seconds, before moving to the side and saying, “C’mon, hop up or someone will see you.”

Steve does, almost trips on the frame but recollects himself before falling on his face. Which, really, is not the first time it happens. Nancy used to make fun of him about it and he can tell Max is about to comment too. But she doesn’t to hold her grudge.

The room is a right mess and Steve has to move a pile of pants to sit on the bed’s corner. 

Max stands in front of him with her arms crossed; she looks so much older than she is. The way she doesn’t almost blink reminds Steve of Billy. Distantly.

“Cool Walkman you have there,” Steve points at it with a shy smile. He’s so not used to talking to girls, of every age, with any purpose. Even if he was a master of apologies when he dated Nancy, now he feels out of place.

Max takes it between her hands and watches as it shines in the daylight. “It’s Billy’s. Don’t...don’t tell him I took it, he would kill me.”

Steve considers her words truer than what she could possibly expect. Nonetheless, he nods seriously. “I won’t, I promise.”

Max sighs and all her animosity seems to crumble a bit as she sits right next to Steve, on the clothes. 

“What’s with all the clothes?” asks Steve, picking up a pink t-shirt with two fingers, inspecting it.

Max blushes a bit, still looking at the Walkman as she answers, “Lucas asked me on an official date. Dinner and everything.”

Steve smirks and pushes against her shoulder with his arm, winking. She flips him off, but the beginning of a smile creeps in. Maybe he still knows how to work a proper apology. 

“I don’t know what to wear, I don’t care about fancy stuff, it’s stupid and useless because Billy...” she does not finish her sentence before throwing the Walkman on the mattress behind them, a frustrated sound coming from her thin lips. “He does not get it. Nobody does.”

And Steve thinks she’s right, he cannot argue with that because what happened to her brother is quite peculiar, but “Lucas wants to keep your mind off sad things, Max, he knows you well and he cares for you. The fancy part is just for fun, I’m sure he’d spend the night in with you if you asked.”

Lucas Sinclair is a pain in the ass, a foulmouthed little asshole and sometimes even reckless, but he has empathy to sell. More than Dustin and Max put together. Steve loves the boy to death because his heart is pure gold and his edges are a bit rough. That’s a soft spot for Steve.

She seems only partly convinced of Steve’s words, but tries to smile. “I’m sorry for the other night,” she rushes out. It’s what Steve was planning to tell her, so it’s a bit disconcerting when it comes from Max. He arches an eyebrow and waits for some more explanation. “I shouldn’t have asked El to go visit him so often, it was a shitty move. She even told me visiting wouldn’t be a good idea, but I didn’t listen. I lied about what she said.”

Steve rounds her shoulders with an arm, tugs a bit.

“And I’m sorry for treating you like what you wanted didn’t matter. Because it does, to all of us, trust me,” Steve looks straight in her eyes and finds out she can’t hold his gaze like Billy does. He squeezes her even more to his side. Max breathes deeply, she understands. She forgives him.

“Could you...” she starts, but then stops, thinks better of it as she parts from Steve. Then Max takes the Walkman again and gives it to him. “Bring him this, would you?”

Steve takes it like it’s the most precious thing on planet Earth and folds the headset in his jacket pocket. “Of course,” his face is solemn, wants her to have this at least.

“I get Billy doesn’t want to see me—“

“No, hey—“

“It’s okay. Honestly, we mostly yelled at each other when he was here, so, yeah,” she cuts him off and picks a blue jumper from the floor, sniffs it, drops it back. “I annoyed him. His father beat him so hard when I sneaked out with Lucas and I did it anyway. He always came pick me up at his with black eyes and blood everywhere. So angry. But he never told Neil a single word about Lucas, he knew it would be the end of me. Him, too.”

Steve doesn’t know why Max is telling him all of this, but listens carefully. It’s not everyday you get to peek in Billy Hargrove’s mysterious and tormented life.

“He’s good, Steve,” she apparently concludes, “Don’t let them take the last good he has in him.”

Steve often finds himself impressed with the kids’ maturity. How they face extraordinary life’s obstacles is remarkable, but Max’s words are outstanding for him. She understands things Steve cannot even see. She shows her sensible side to protect her brother, trusting Steve with personal information because she can’t do much else.

“Does he touch you too?” Steve hears the pure anger in his voice milliseconds before feeling it rasp his chest from the inside. His teeth and fists are clenched to the point of causing pain. “Neil?”

Max widens her eyes and quickly shakes her head. “No. No, never.”

That does not make Steve feel better. “If he ever does, you come to me and we call Hopper together. He will lock him up and throw the key.” He leaves out all the insults he has for that piece of scum because Max would miss her date to hear the end of it.

Her eyes are sheepish, look down, her fierce manners tamed by the worst of subjections. “I wish my mom didn’t marry him, you know? He’s not a good person, not like Billy.”

Steve sometimes feels like his parents. Sometimes he buys unnecessary things because he can or tries to talk someone else in doing something they don’t want to. Or, at least, he used to. Even in the small gestures, scratching his head while thinking; drinking directly from the bottle of milk. And now he feels lucky, because although it’s annoying being constantly reminded of them without wanting to, his parents are not fucking pricks like Billy’s.

Even with all the sorrow Neil’s caused him, Billy still gets his little sister assuring he is inherently good. Steve mentally adds resilient to the list of things Billy is, among provocative, auto-destructive, angry, violent. 

“You’re good, too. And I’m sure your mother is as well, don’t let his problems change you. Run away if necessary; nobody should bear this.”

Max smiles a little and her eyes are watery when she turns back to the clothes, as if remembering just now what she has to do. “So, uhm, what do you say?” she’s holding an orange pair of suspenders in one hand and a black shirt in the other. Steve turns his nose, smiles amused.

Then he picks up a simple green dress with little flowers all over and looks at it closely. It reminds him a bit of his mother, he passes it over at Max, “Try this, you look lovely in green.”

Max’s cheeks turn a deep red, but she takes the dress and examines the color, then nods. “All right, thanks Steve.”

“Maxine!” calls her mother from another area of the house. Steve jolts up and gets to the window as Max rushes him out. He’s on the grass before her mother calls for her again, closer to the door.

Max throws him the Walkman without a word, but Steve gets it immediately. She waves him goodbye from behind the closed glass and he winks at her as the blinds tune him out of the life in the Hargrove house. 

Steve returns to the car and speeds away with the wheels moving a lot of mud. He hopes the night is fun for Max, she deserves it; makes a mental note of asking Lucas about their date just to take the piss and a little bit because he wants to know how it went. 

As he drives back to the center of Hawkins, Steve thinks his and Billy’s life are nothing alike, even if the car trip to school is.

He dines with an heated bowl of tasteless noodles, in front of the television. Nothing seems to have changed from the prior week, but a huge secret lurks in his bedroom and Steve’s mind cannot really focus on anything else.

Before the food is finished, he knocks to check on Billy, because he’s a weird and damaged good person. He has his Walkman in one hand and taps his bare foot on the carpet as he waits for Billy to open.

“I’m sleeping,” comes from inside. The voice is clear, no signs of sleep in it, so Steve scoffs to himself.

“You aren’t.”

The door finally opens and Steve is met with a sweaty and shirtless Billy Hargrove. He’s slightly panting as his blue eyes scan Steve from head to toe, stopping on the Walkman, then his eyebrow arches inquisitorial. “What do you want, Harrington?”

Steve—Steve does not remember, that’s the thing. He’s seen Billy shirtless countless of times, at basketball practices, parties, heck Steve is used to him being shirtless more than with clothes on. He’s seen Billy naked, even, in the school’s showers where he loved to annoy Steve talking about Nancy or how the basket was a far memory for King Steve.

But now, now the plains of his chest and abdomen are raw. The skin is of an ugly red on his sides, a series of messy cuts is where once there was only golden skin. Steve cannot pull his eyes off the huge scars left by the Mind Flayer’s tentacles and he feels noodles trying to escape his stomach.

Billy squirms under his eyes, pulls off a confident stance, but actually closes the door a bit so that half his body is hidden behind it. “What the fuck do you want?” Billy goes again, angrier, wounded by the attention.

Steve swallows loudly, then forces himself to look at Billy’s face because he hates himself for staring, too. “Max gave me this for you,” he hands out the Walkman and Billy rips it out of his fingers. Then proceeds to close the door.

Steve’s foot blocks it and he doesn’t even know why before he speaks. “Billy?” Just a question with no meaning other than making sure the other boy is okay.

“Harrington, for fuck’s sake, you sound like a pussy.”

And with that the door is slammed shut on Steve. He remains frozen on the spot, hand still held up to pass over the Walkman and eyes low where Billy’s body has been. He would like to mend all of that scars, if only he could, because Steve has the superhero complex gone bad, transformed in the obsession of a mother hen.

It’s physically difficult for him going back downstairs when he’s seen a huge bit of Billy’s pain; the one he tries to shadow so much and with so scarce results.

When Billy starts screaming at two in the morning, Steve is already there to end it as soon as possible.

The next day two things happen: Murray Bauman is at his door for the morning shift at his and Nancy Wheeler stops at his workplace again.

Murray is not a man of apologies, he steps in with a straight face like nothing happened and plops down on the couch where Steve’s blankets and pillow still are. Steve is late, so they barely talk as he buttons up his shirt to head to work.

Nancy is already at the shop when he arrives, Steve knows she has to go to the Hawkins Post in a few, but invites her in anyway because she has an expression that screams for him to listen to what she has to say.

“You’re almost unreachable, Steve Harrington,” she scolds him, clutches at her purse and scans the whole place with her big eyes.

Steve sighs, “‘M sorry, I had some...stuff to take care of.”

Nancy drops it probably because his voice is as tired as his body feels. Emotional draining and a sleepless night do things to your will to live.

“I wanted to tell you what happened on Halloween.”

Steve, in all honesty, forgot about it. He had his days full of people to latch together with poor results and maybe he likes it better than being on his own anyway. But the weird neighborhood had been archived. He waits for Nancy to speak, still.

“I took the kids there, we knocked on every single door. Nobody answered,” she whispers, her tone is spooky and sends sone chills down Steve’s spine. 

“Nobody meaning nobody...at all?” Now his interest is being tickled again, he can’t help it.

Nancy shakes her head, leans forward on the cash, “There weren’t even decorations on their houses. No pumpkins, plastic ghosts, nothing. Hawkins’ people love Halloween, they always have.”

Steve agrees that it’s weird, asks “How many houses have you checked?” And Nancy slams a paper filled with names in front of him, it’s like she had it ready somewhere behind her back. Typical Nancy.

Steve skims through it and counts, they’re at least ten different names. “Brians?” he looks closer, “Macy Brians?”

Nancy nods, “You know her family?” her detective mode is on, pen already in one hand while the other searches for the block-notes.

“Yeah, she’s the daughter of one of my mother’s friends, she used to come at mine when I was younger. Macy was too little at the time, but now she should be around Dustin’s age,” he explains. He remembers little Macy, huge face and bigger ears. She was a smart kid, joyful. It sounds weird that a happy girl like her would want to miss Halloween night. “Ask Mike to search for her at school.”

Nancy writes down the girl’s name and knocks gently the side of the pen on Steve’s tall hair. “Thanks, you’re always precious.”

Steve smiles, he appreciates the comment, but, maybe for the first time in forever, takes it as a simple compliment. He doesn’t dwell on why she said it, he knows her main focus is the investigation, Steve is just helping her and nothing more. They’re friends; friends are nothing more.

Surprisingly, firstly to himself, Steve is fine with it. Too tired to blink, he could not dive himself in the sea of what ifs even if he wanted to.

“Nancy?” he calls as she takes quick, snappy strides toward the exit. She turns with her hand on the door. “Next time you go there I’ll come too.”

Nancy smiles a little, both knowing too well how dangerous it is to chase monsters alone. “Yeah, okay. But answer your phone, Harrington,” she teases, then flies away.

He thinks his mother would agree with what Nancy says, as she always has when they were together. Then his head stops on Macy’s big ears and the chill only the forest can bring him, reappears.

Hawkins is not safe, has not been for the past three years.

The day goes by slowly, Steve finds himself eager to head home, check on Billy and Murray. He really hopes they don’t kill each other before lunchtime because Steve would take it personally.

Getting back home is a flash, he drives without even realizing it, too deep in his head. He half-runs to the door when he gets there, calls for Murray as soon as he’s inside.

“Here!” comes from outside and Steve is so worked up, he’s ready to yell at him because, really? Does he ever learn?

Instead, what he finds is Murray Bauman and Billy Hargrove sit by the pool with two big cigars between their lips. Billy is chuckling and Murray looks as relaxed as one can get.

“What the hell is happening here?”

“You should calm down and come smoke with us, pretty boy,” mocks Billy. The nickname so fresh in Steve’s mind from a life before he can’t even look at Billy. He’s fully dressed, but his scars are still visible to Steve, have been all night. The chant of you could have done more in his head.

“Yeah, Steve, come sit with us,” chimes in Murray.

Steve is lost for words, what is happening? “Are you guys high?” he finally asks.

“I wish,” laughs Billy, “But these cigars are a good enough replacement.”

Murray hums at that, points at Billy with a big grin, they look like old friends and it messes with Steve’s mind order a lot. Doesn’t Billy remember Murray closing his door to not let him out? Is he really that forgiving for anyone who isn’t Steve? He doesn’t understand. Which usually leaves him indifferent because Steve is not Nancy or Jim, but now it pisses him right off.

To the point where he has to head back in the house or he’ll start talking too much and ruin their little moment.

The thing is, Billy is not nice. He shouts and hits, he’s savage. Vindictive, too. Steve thought he could gradually change and become a composed human being again, with patience on both their parts, with time. Not in one morning, with Murray.

After some time, Billy gets in the kitchen with him and starts eating an apple, looking like the careless persona he never was. His blue irides follow Steve as he scrambles a couple of eggs in a pan, purposely not offering any. 

“What got stuck up your ass, King?” Billy surely knows how to push Steve’s buttons just right. Steve is sure he is trying to get a reaction, so he tries to calm down and shrugs. “You look like you could use some sleep.”

Steve does not look at Billy, hears him loudly chew on the apple and can sense his smirk. Wants to ask Billy what is up with his mood swings, if he realizes how bipolar he is. So he kind of does, “And you could stop freaking out one day and making friends with the people you actually hate the next,” he hisses, all his bones hurt and he’s so tired. He just wants Billy to leave him alone, at least physically, since he’s always with Steve in his head.

Steve expects Billy to tell him to fuck off, maybe even snarl at him or go away, but he should know better than taking for granted Billy Hargrove’s reactions because Billy steps near him, apple still in one hand. “What got you so worked up, Steve? Seeing me with my shirt off got you hot and bothered?”

“Fuck you, Billy,” he spits, shoves at him with no grace, needs air to breathe because Billy always takes up too much space when he comes near. To hit, to tease, there’s no difference and Steve is used to this. 

Only that he isn’t because it’s his kitchen and everywhere he turns is Billy, Billy, Billy. The pungent smell of cigar clouds his senses.

“You jerked off to my scars, pretty boy?” Billy murmurs, near again. Steve can feel his hot breath on his neck and he hates it. Billy is not new to innuendos, Steve uses them too as a shield sometimes, has with Billy himself, but right now they’re a bit over the top. They make Steve uneasy in a weird way, as only something personal would make him feel. It’s the same worm of fury Billy talking about Nancy caused.

He breathes in, deep, an attempt to collect himself. “You know, you’re right,” he shoots back, a mean grin on his face he remembers using with very few people, Jonathan Byers being one of them. Billy arches an eyebrow and looks at his mouth with curious eyes when Steve turns his way. Steve leans in, “You kept me up.”

Billy’s body is so near Steve can feel the heat radiate from it, it soothes his nerves by giving them a new electricity to run on. “Oh, did I?” Billy almost purrs. He wants to bring Steve to the limit, wants to see to what point he can bring it. Because Billy is daring, loves seeing his prey fumble for some time. Even better when they try fighting back. Steve knows this side of Billy, can deal with it when it’s aimed at him.

“Yeah,” he whispers back. Then, “With your screams,” he adds.

And it’s not fair, it’s unnecessary and stupid but he’s so tired. Murray was smoking with him; Billy can’t even put up a decent play when he wants to, acts like he’s the head of it all because facing the fact that he’s the victim is too much. And Steve usually respects people’s ways to cope with their shit, like he wished Nancy would respect his, but not today. Today there’s scars and Macy Brians and Max’s eyes when she talked about domestic violence and all the lies he has to tell his friends while friends don’t lie, Steve. 

Billy falters some, takes two steps back and slams the remaining of the green apple on the counter. “You choose to show personality in really random occasions, Harrington. What? You look boring for a year to prepare for your big moment?”

His words cut and Steve can feel the guilt arise in his chest, stays silent anyway. He won’t take back what he said, not even for Billy’s scars. He grunts, the eggs are burning but he doesn’t turn off the stove. “What happened yesterday? What scared you to the point of running away?”

“Mind your fucking business, and watch your mouth,” Billy’s shoulders are tight, he’s looking at Steve like a punch is the softer thing he can think of doing to him. “You have a lot to think about, trust me. Lying to your little friends because you have to hide a monster and you like it! You don’t understand that not everything can be saved, you’re not that special.”

A monster.

Steve is against Billy before rationality can stop him.

“You’re hurting and I get it,” he blows in Billy’s face, their eyes at the same level as Steve pushes him against the counter, both hands in his sweater, one Steve recognizes as his own from a few years back. “But you have to stop being an asshole with who’s trying to help because people will get tired of you, eventually.”

Billy pushes back, but Steve’s hold is too strong and he’s outraged, almost growls. “But I won’t. The more you push, the more I’ll be after you. I see you, Billy. Won’t play your stupid games.”

They have a stare down, one where Billy’s hands are on Steve and vice-versa, fighting for supremacy over the nothing framing their lives. Two starved animals in search of relief.

The grey light the clouds provide filters through the windows, it makes Billy’s face look unearthly. His eyes of the same color of the sky and Steve doesn’t let go of him, blocks his neck with his forearm to make sure Billy gets what he’s talking about. That he can fight all he wants, but Steve is not a man who surrenders. Especially when Billy’s goal is to make him.

“You’ll never get shit, Harrington,” he quite literally spits on his face, shoves hard enough for Steve to stumble back. “How can you? You go around baby-sitting, enjoying the privileges of your rich ass, not a worry in the world. I’ve known thousands like you. And beat all of them.”

Steve laughs darkly, shakes his head, is faced with yet again the same problem. Billy has always seen him as something too distant, too detached from real problems. He does not realize how connected they are in the horror of supernatural. In the horror of life.

“Why are you so scared of people caring for you, Billy? Your dad’s—“

The punch arrives as a thunderstorm, it connects with Steve’s jaw hard enough to make his whole skull rattle. Billy’s hand is as heavy as he remembers it, makes him spit drops of blood on his white floor. “Shut the fuck up.”

Another punch, harder, to Steve’s stomach. It wrinkles his uniform and he distractedly considers George wouldn’t be happy about it. “Don’t fucking talk about my family like you know shit.”

And Steve lets Billy take it out, one hit at the time. One to the face again, one to the side where Billy’s skin is scarred for good, even an elbow in the middle of the chest, knocking his air out. In between hits, Steve looks at him, smiles bloodily, even tells him he sees Billy. Over and over, until Murray catches up on what is happening and pulls Billy away from him. 

Steve registers a couple of agents rushing in too, blocking Billy as he rants insults directed at him. While he’s on the floor, body aching on the cold tiles, Steve thinks he can finally sleep. Maybe Billy will too.

Jim Hopper finds him outside, smoking, with a bag of ice pressed to the cheek. 

He stays silent and takes off his hat, pats his shoulder to let him know he’s there, as if his size wasn’t enough of an indication. 

“I know what you’re about to say and no,” Steve says, talking hurts a bit the cut on his upper lip, but he doesn’t care. “I don’t want him out.”

“Kid—“

“No, really. Not after all of this,” he shakes the ice for Jim’s sake. He may think Hopper sees what he does, in it.

“I can’t let you be near him if he’s violent, Steve, he’s out of his mind, clearly,” Hopper tries to explain, his eyebrows pinched in pain because he hates when his plans don’t go as he hoped. 

“This is the most Billy thing he’s done since he’s here.”

Steve is happy about what happened, it felt like what Billy needed and, deep down, it soothed him too. The danger he subtly looks for continuously was served to him in his kitchen, making him pant and spit blood. And Steve liked it.

“Owens said the same thing,” admits Hopper. He watches in Steve’s general direction not really seeing him, going in one of those places Hopper often goes to. Maybe to his daughter. “But it’s my fault, it was a reckless idea and I shouldn’t even have told you.”

The eagerness Steve has to help is put on the spot, again. It doesn’t sting his pride as it did when Billy brought it up, but Hopper has pity in his eyes and Steve has to look away. He might go mad from all the pressure he feels.

“I can do it,” Steve tells him decisively. 

Hopper looks at him like that’s exactly what worries him.

“He was telling Murray that he wanted back to the clinic too, this morning.”

That’s a surprise for Steve. It makes his stomach drop to his feet, empty as it is because the eggs became black and the pan is now only good for the trash. “Oh?”

Jim nods, “Yeah, he was charming him to let him go back, like Murray has a fucking say in anything,” he chuckles lowly, his mustache moving with it. “Owens said no, still does actually.”

Steve is putting together the pieces. Billy was playing, once again, he was acting friendly with Murray to get where he wanted. He’s not new to using his charms, Steve remembers more than one professor falling for his pearls and blue eyes at school. Billy probably entered the kitchen with the purpose of heating things up, to demonstrate how him being there was not a good idea after all.

The main question, though, still remains unsolved: Why? 

“He’s smart, isn’t he?” Jim guesses his thoughts, moves his hat from one hand to another. “I just want to make sure you’re still on my page here, kiddo. You’re not doing this because you feel responsible, are you?”

Steve immediately shakes his head and immediately knows he’s lying to the Chief of Police. Only the water in the pool knowing the truth about him and his loneliness.

Jim doesn’t look convinced but relaxes his shoulders in the uniform. “Good.”

Hopper stands up again, his meaningful speeches are always reduced to the bone because he can’t really stand feelings. Steve is reminded again of his dad, misses him for the first time in months. 

“Hop?”

“Yeah, kid?” he turns just like Nancy did in the shop. Like people expect him to say something when they leave. They always do, leave.

“I can do this,” he’s not sure who he’s trying to convince, but Hopper is not.

“Then, next time, throw some punches back.”

And with that he leaves, big dirty boots on the concrete. Steve lights up another cigarette and looks at his bedroom’s window. Blinds meet his gaze as he thinks that he wouldn’t fight back if Billy tried attacking him again. It made him feel mentally good; full. He was paying back Billy for all the pain the world caused him, them.

Steve is mental. Likes the burn of the hot butt of the smoke on his raw lip. He keeps it there with intention, then dives his face in the ice bag. 

He can’t let it happen again, he’s heard the doctor and the Sheriff yelling at each other in his father’s office. He knows Billy has too. Hopper sweared this was the only and last time he let Billy do something like that. A jolt of affection had run in his lungs when he had heard Jim say that Steve was the priority in all of this, that Billy could be put somewhere else if they searched hard enough.

Still, Steve won’t let them take him away. Billy’s probably the only person more damaged than Steve feels and he selfishly has to keep him near. He has to soak into the feeling of not being looked at like something broken, because Billy punches him as if he can take all of it.

He can.

And the fact that, when he closes his puffy eyes he sees the long lashes over angry grey eyes, is for Steve to cope with.  
~

Max once had made a comment about how their moving to Indiana was all Billy’s fault. He screamed, back then, almost running over her pack of stupid friends dressed as the Ghostbusters. Billy didn’t want to hear about it.

Because it was the truth. 

Neil had found the idiotic sappy letter that boy in middle school had written him, he had signed it with a trembling 'Robby' followed by a heart and everything had downhilled pretty fast. Billy had tried to explain he didn’t care about it, that it was there by mistake, he was not a faggot. But the truth was, is, that Billy likes what he likes.

Robby from eighth grade had described Billy’s eyes and golden hair like nobody ever did. It made him feel pathetic how many times he re-read the thing, still sore from his mother leaving him. Even years later, Robby was one of his recurrent thoughts, it made him feel protected when Neil’s rage was aimed at him. With every hit, Billy internally screamed to him about Robby’s words.

With every hit Billy thought that, at least, Neil couldn’t take that away from him. No matter what.

But one day Max had found this letter while rummaging through his damn things, her twelve year old self had mentioned it over dinner and Billy’s heart had stopped.

What happened next made Billy scream for real, not just in his head, not about his secret anymore. Neil hates two things more than his son; black people and homosexuals. Billy is white, but all the bruises that had stained his skin for the weeks after where as black as the night. Then green and yellow. 

Susan had brought him to the hospital when Neil had left and she took her fair amount of shit for it, later. It was the only time Billy felt sorry for her, until Neil communicated the police was starting asking questions and it was time for them to move. Officially, he found a new job in Indiana, that’s what he told him and Max over yet another meal. Not even the little one had believed it.

The funny thing, to Billy, is that he does not even remember Robby’s face. He imagines him, sometimes, changes his features as he likes, because it doesn’t really matter, the problem was never what he looked like, but what he was. A boy. Male.

Billy remembers beating him too, the first time he’d tried kissing him near the swings at the park, horrified because faggots are mental. But Robby had tried again and Billy, still soft on the edges, with a full moon face and prepubertal acne, had given in. 

That was it, the messy kiss of two kids, nothing more. Robby had left California shortly after and Billy had pretended it didn’t feel like the millionth stab to the back.

From then on Billy started going out with girls, fucking them when he was a bit older just to leave their side after he was done. He even lucidly decided to move on to older women on the anniversary of his mother’s leaving, because Billy hates himself too much.

He thought about Robby in the past year just when the pain was too much; he needed a life jacket every once in a while, to remind him that Robby had thought he was beautiful. He usually ended up drunk somewhere in the woods, maybe with Tommy Hall, maybe alone, it didn’t matter.

Billy, now on Harrington’s bed with his hands still sore from punching the life out of him, admits to himself that King Steve reminds him of Robby in all the wrong ways, always has.

Steve is unapologetic, he runs around trying to be genuinely good, even with monsters like Billy who only try to hurt him. He’s confident and smart and Billy dislikes the way he puts his hands in his jeans pocket. His stupid hair too.

It started on the first day of school, murmurs of the golden couple Harrington-Wheeler had bored him before third period. He was full of good looking jocks winning the good girl’s heart, assholes matching with other assholes. Then Billy had seen him, leaning on a locker, a pair of obnoxious sunglasses on, talking to his girlfriend with a huge grin. And he’d been jealous, thought he could never have that, mainly because he didn’t want it.

The mean zingers were refreshing until they weren’t anymore. Talking to him in the showers made his head spin too dangerously to understand why. And Billy actually felt thrilled when he got the chance to lay his hands on Harrington outside the hour of basketball practice, to beat him up.

He hates Harrington, cannot stand him. When he cooks for him, yells at people locking him down, looks at Billy with 'again' written all over his face as Billy hurts him.

It drives him mad. 

It makes him feel so good to be the center of his attention. 

While he was throwing punches, Steve didn’t look like he had somewhere else to be, Billy was his something to do and it made Billy feel high, want more. More, again.

He tries to push him away, use him to get where he wants, to run off where nobody knows him and his story, but Steve corners him with those brown eyes. He keeps smoking by the pool with ice pressed against Billy’s marks. And Billy hopes they’ll stay for longer than normal because if Steve Harrington gets ruined, it has to be his doing, no one else’s.

Still, he has to get away, back to the clinic even, because being this near him drives Billy mad. Completely. He pushes down his emotions, traps them between sorrow, envy, anger, but they eventually pop up. When Steve knocks on his door to stop his nightmares, when he looks at his scars with that look Billy can’t even describe. It makes Billy feel weak as only Neil can. Could.

Billy showers and watches as Harrington’s blood runs down to the bottom of the shower. 

He tries really hard not to imagine him there, asking Billy to wash away the bruises he caused in the first place. Tries really hard not to picture Harrington asking for more and again as Billy gives it to him, compliant for once.

But Billy Hargrove is a weak man, ask Neil, ask Steve Harrington. He wraps his hand around himself and jerks off without even looking down, too disgusted to acknowledge what he’s doing. He gets Harrington out of his system, muffles the chant of his name against his forearm, bites on it, cries even because it’s mental and wrong.

And he can’t stop. Harrington’s eyes, his perfect life, bent for him. Billy wants to make him scream from pain, from pleasure. Transform his collected manners into a mess at his feet because all Billy knows is violence, the best and worst moments of his life are framed by it.

He increases his hand’s speed, chases the short-term relief by rutting against his fingers.

Harrington’s cherry lips, the moles right under his jaw, Billy sees everything without being seen back. In the steamed shower-box he can grip at his short hair and pretend it’s Harrington’s, lie to himself and imagine the pain is for Steve to feel as well.

When he comes it’s a hard wave that weakens his knees, he’s left panting “Steve” over and over. The water too loud for him to realize what he’s saying. 

That night, hair still damp from the shower, Billy does not sleep.  
~

Steve gets to work with the silent hope of not getting asked what the fuck happened to his face. His wish is strangely fulfilled, even under the inquiring look Florence gives him. The other clients simply mind their business, maybe one or two clutch their purses closer. 

He gets through the morning and closes the Supermarket before Joyce Byers can intercept him on her way in. He almost runs to his BMW and even gets the keys near the ignition, when Dustin Henderson suddenly appears outside his car window, making him hiss and drop the keys.

The kid knocks on the glass with an angry look on his face. Steve braces himself and rolls the window down. “Hey, Henderson!” He reaches out with his hand, ready for Dustin to shake it, but, of course, he doesn’t.

“Two weeks,” he just says. The lisp so prominent when he’s pissed. His hair is a mess, under the hat, his elbows scratched and covered in dirt do not surprise Steve from where he observes his crossed arms. He thinks kids cross their arms at him too often.

“I’m sorr—“

“Two weeks and you got into a fight, one you lost, apparently,” Dustin cuts him off and pokes at the corner of his eye with little to no gentleness. “Who?”

Steve sighs, motions to the seat next to him and Dustin doesn’t think about it twice, hops on with his rigid stance.

“Where do you wanna go, kid?” Steve playfully points at the sun and Dustin half smiles.

“I have to radio Suzie at three,” he shrugs, the smile gets bigger. Steve finds it cute, checks his wrist-clock and accepts the fact that he will have to wait three hours with an angry Henderson on a hill. “I want to ask her to visit next summer”

Steve wiggles his eyebrows and drives out of the park, Joyce Byers can’t be too far. “Sounds cool, man, she’ll be over the moon,” Steve tells him, turns up the radio because Alphaville is playing and does not consider Dustin when he puffs. “What’s the matter, Dusty? You’d rather listen to Limahl?”

Dustin flips him off, but he’s relaxed now, bounces on his seat as he watches the road go by. Steve falls into the routine of driving Henderson around, the familiarity of his little acquired brother forgiving him without wanting to, as the most natural of things.

The kid then asks him what he knows about Mars and to Steve’s horror proceeds to fill him in on everything Mr. Clarke could fit into his brain. Which is a lot. They arrive at the hill with Dustin still trying to describe what the atmosphere would look like on Mars given its distance to the sun. Steve has an headache.

“Man, how are you gonna convince your mother to let your girlfriend visit?” It’s an asshole move, but it shuts Dustin long enough for them to climb on the top of the hill where Dustin’s set of antennae stand. He starts pushing buttons and connecting wires while Steve lays on the cold grass, welcoming the pale sun of November.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?” he turns his head to Henderson, finds his face cautious, a bit sad.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asks Steve, plays with his walkie talkie in absence of something better to do because he can’t sustain Steve’s eyes.

“What? Hey, no. No, no,” Steve reaches out to comfort his friend, then uses his hands as leverage and sits up, legs crossed. “I was just really busy and into my head, I’ve been having some...problems. But there’s nothing to worry about and it was definitely not something you did.”

He feels sorry, looks like whatever he does, no matter how hard he tries to make pieces of his life fall into place, he cannot win. But his problems shouldn’t reflect on a fourteen-year-old, no matter how smart or brave.

“Are you sure? Mom says I should keep my mouth shut, sometimes. That I can be offensive, which, at first, didn’t make sense to me, but...”

Steve laughs and leans to ruffle his curly hair, the hat falls on the grass making Dustin scoff, annoyed. “I love you, man. I promise it was nothing you did or said,” he crosses his heart.

“Sappy,” Dustin mocks, wide grin and full cheeks.

“Hey, I’m not the one on a random hill trying to call my girlfriend from the solar camp to tell her about how the moon is the same from wherever you look from,” Steve lays down again, a shit-eating smirk on as he bends his arms to support his head.

“That happened once,” the kid hisses, “Looks like you want to be beat up some more, Harrington,” comments Dustin.

It makes Steve laugh more, the inside joke being that he actually does. By Billy’s hands if he gets to choose, thank you. “You couldn’t take me.”

Dustin arches a challenging eyebrow, “Oh, really? You literally won one fight and it was because the phone you used to knock out the guy was heavy enough!”

“The guy was a trained Russian soldier! And I saved your precious ass that time!” Steve is incredulous, the audacity of this kid is something else.

Dustin rolls his eyes, but lays down near Steve, comments on the clouds above them mentioning some weird weather phenomenon Steve doesn’t care about. Then, like the topic never changed and he just needed to get out some more science, he says, “No, but really, if you’re in trouble and need me, us, you know we have your back. Always.”

If a tear threatens to run down his cheek, Steve doesn’t let it show, he smiles softly at Dustin and swallows the tightness down. He seriously loves the boy, doesn’t know what would have happened if he didn’t ask for his help with the demodog that day. It gave back to Steve the thrill of holding the nailed bat, to defend who couldn’t; it got him deeper in his complexes too, but Steve wouldn’t change the past, at least not that particular bit.

He ruffles Dustin’s hair some more because he’s a goof and doesn’t really know what else to do without it being too much, making him spill over the cold grass what has been up with him.

So he just says, “Thanks, man, I really appreciate it. But don’t worry about me, it was a stupid fight with Tommy H. over old stuff,” he shrugs, painfully thinks it’s getting easier to lie, kind of believes it himself because his bruises and split lip cannot be from Billy’s hands, Billy who lives with him, Billy back from the dead.

Dustin is not like Jim, he blindly trusts Steve to always tell the truth; they have a secret (not so secret) handshake, after all. The kid starts launching lisped insults at the guy, even goes hard on Carol and Steve chuckles because they kind of deserve it, even if they’re not involved right now.

Steve sometimes thinks about how he doesn’t miss them, not at all. He largely prefers drinking alone at the sides of the road or hang in his big house without them skinny dipping in his fucking pool or snogging on a lounger. He realizes all is left from his high school period is Nancy Wheeler and a couple of the guys from the basketball team, who have left for college. And Steve is okay with it.

He passes two fingers on his lips, when Dustin’s eyes are closed, thinks he has Billy Hargrove too, actually. Billy hates him deeply, but Steve prefers the honest hatred to whatever fake friendship.

Looking to his side, at Dustin weirdly long limbs, trying to keep the antennae stable after a gust of wind, Steve thinks he knows what fellowship truly is. And gets up to help him, laughing.

They wait for the right hour to come, talking about Mike’s new bike because Dustin wants it too but says it’s redundant. Steve swears to himself he’ll buy Dustin that same bike on Christmas because that’s what older brothers do. The kid also laments how Eleven and Max are growing distant and Steve spends a good half an hour trying to explain that it’s normal, growing a little apart, but having different interests doesn’t mean being incompatible.

Which makes him think, too. He usually says things he knows are right, but doesn’t live by himself. Now, though, Steve’s eyes wonder down the hill to his parked car and a little spark of intuition makes him grin. He feels it all in his bruised cheekbones and he continues anyway.

When Henderson is done talking, singing too, to Suzie, Steve drives him home and says hi to his mother. Promises he will be back for dinner, one of these days, and gets back into his car. When he arrives at the beginning of the road leading to his house, he passes it in favor of the center of Hawkins. He has a permission to obtain.

Steve does not see or hear from Billy that evening, or the day after that. He’s back in the limbo they fell into after Steve told him about the Gate. And Steve is drained, ponders how it’s like taking one step forward, if being beaten up can count, and a million backward. It’s a swing, exactly like Billy’s moods.

Robin stops by with a box full of pepperoni pizza, her favorite, and Steve is pretty much done with everything, so he lets her in, doesn’t think of Billy again.

Only, he does, when Robin leans on the same portion of counter he’s cornered Billy against, or when she drops a slice of pizza because she’s too deep in a long complaint about her mother.

And he does again when he realizes he would like for Billy to join them because Steve likes mysteries a little too much.

Robin believes his Tommy H. story, laughs about it and says Tommy deserved it no matter what he said. They eat standing in the kitchen, bantering like an old couple and Steve even gets through a call with his dad with Robin’s eyes checking on him under the green fringe.

As they’re in the middle of an old Happy Days episode (since Robin has the hots for Henry Winkler, says he’s the only man she would go down on) she tells him he could use a quickie with someone she’s met in a bar. “It’s your type, tiny and super-annoying,” she gets out, her mouth still has tomato sauce on the corners, but Steve does not point it out.

Robin doesn’t like Nancy, she’s an “Uptight bitch” according to her. Steve hadn’t liked it the first time he had heard the comment, but quickly learned how Robin expresses her thoughts; loudly and tactlessly. That’s why Dustin likes her, he considers. Later, he understood she was just being a good friend to him and sided with Steve even if there weren’t sides to take.

“Rob,” he reprimands, pushing her shoulder lightly. “You are my one and only, remember?” he jokes, wiggling his eyebrows and ignoring the pang it sends to his brain.

She rolls her eyes, “You could find a repressed country girl looking for some trouble with that face, think about it.”

Steve chuckles, it’s not like the perspective of finding some release in a random girl does not appeal to him, but he also feels too busy, not completely focused on all the things he has to do. Steve doesn’t need more complications. “I will,” he says anyway, goes on commenting a pick up line Fonzie uses that makes them both cringe, Robin swoons too, though.

If they’re talking too loudly for Billy to rest, Steve tells himself it’s not his problem.

The signs fade slowly, melt with his skin tone in dots of yellow and purple, the cut on his lip is almost closed and he can’t help but lap at it every now and then; when Joyce Byers points it out with her motherly worried eyes or Nancy curls her lips when they meet casually near her house.

She’s with Jonathan and maybe that’s the reason why she doesn’t ask Steve what’s up with his face. Byers, with his hooked shoulders and evasive stares, reminds her that Steve is not her business anymore. She tells him her mother is organizing a gathering in their garden for Nancy’s birthday and Steve can tell she would rather analyze half dead trees in the forest, maybe even be swallowed by one of them, but tells her it will be a pleasure for him going.

It’s weird, uncomfortable, seeing how Jonathan hovers over her and moves when she does, his entire body always turned to her as if she’s the sun and he’s a simple sunflower. Even when he looks away, his peculiar hair all over his face, Steve can tell he’s checking on Nancy. 

Byers looks at her like he’s constantly trying to find the perfect shot, to hang it on his wall later. And Steve finds them perfect for one another, almost hears their synchronized breaths when he’s with them, notices their strides are different but they walk even. 

He’s happy for them, he is fine with them. Which took a lot of up and downs, but he can tell now he’s definitely over it. There are simply people made to be together, they click even if their edges are incompatible, apparently. Steve is aware of his own, too sharp for anyone to get close for long enough.

But that’s okay, too.

Nancy and Jonathan walk away, they start talking hurriedly, almost in each other’s ears, with complicity.

His house feels even colder when he gets inside in the late afternoon. Billy is not around, but Steve makes a beeline for the pool, starts clearing it from all the leafs because he needs to think.

Jim gave him the permission to go retrieve Billy’s car, what is left of it after Steve slammed against the side of it in front of StarCourt. He will go pick it up tomorrow, after work.

Subtly, he hopes it will give Billy something to do during the long days, since talking to Steve doesn’t seem like an option. 

As he gathers all the wet leafs on the pool side, he keeps glancing at the blinded window, wonders if Billy ever does the same. Steve drains the pool from all the water and even starts brushing the tiles inside it until dark. He’s not confident enough out there to stay in the night time, so he gets back inside and eats a bowl of cereals with milk.

He hopes Billy accepts what Owens brings him daily, because Steve never caught him in the kitchen after the apple and cigars time. He sometimes hears him moving around, maybe weightlifting with the set Steve had bought once and never touched. He hears his footsteps, the chair against the floor. The bed, if he’s walking down the corridor at the right time, but for the most part it’s like he’s alone in the house again.

He considers knocking once or twice, then remembers the anger in Billy’s features and thinks better of it. He’s not scared, he’s past that, only Billy’s face shaped as a toothed flower would make him run away, but the crooked feeling he gets in front of the guy unsettles him. In a good way that scares Steve.

He lays on the couch early, figures he can use some more sleep since transporting the wreck of the Camaro will use all of his energy. 

He’s seeing weird shapes, dark spots, vines maybe, when Billy’s screams start.

They’re different, Steve has heard enough to immediately understand that. It’s a set of grunts, thuds, as if Billy’s violently shaking in Steve’s bed. He sits up, registers where he is in a little over three seconds, still has the trace of saliva on the side of his face and gets up. Climbs the steps two at the time, he doesn’t need to see them, it’s a ritual by now, he knows everything by heart.

Billy grunts, he’s panting, the bed moves on the wooden floor. There aren’t coherent words, he’s not scared, just angry. Steve’s insides churn as it reminds him of the sounds Billy made when he was hitting him. The first time, the last.

He bangs on the door, strongly. Once, twice, ten times. 

Billy’s recalcitrant movements don’t stop. If possible, they intensify as his deep puffs do. Steve kicks the door, calls “Billy? Billy, wake up! It’s just a bad dream, wake up!” And it’s useless. It’s agony, endless too, judging by how he doesn’t wake up.

Steve kicks more, but soon decides to enter, hand on the doorknob sweaty and trembling. He should call Owens if it doesn’t stop, his brain starts spinning in a thousand directions, he frantically tries to remember where he wrote down the doctor’s number. He’s so stupid, he should have paid more attention.

The room is dark, only a slice of moonlight lightens the bed, where a shirtless and wet Billy is shaking. The sounds again, are not human, he’s throwing his arms up in the air, as if he’s defending himself from something, someone. Steve rushes to the bed, must look as out of his mind with the wrinkled clothes and hair all over the place, an eye still dark.

Billy’s face is disfigured by the pain hunting him, he has a deep frown where sweat pools. His lips are a thin line under his hinted stubble. He gnaws on his own teeth, the sound piercing in the silence of the night. Steve has no time to linger on the pattern of scars on his body, the marks in relief against the gloomy light of the moon.

“Billy!” Steve calls again, his own voice upsets him for how worried it sounds. “Jesus, Billy! Wake up!” 

Steve reaches for his shoulders, shakes vigorously the already shaking body. Billy’s skin is cold under his hot fingers and Steve doesn’t stop calling him over the other’s grunts. He’s on the verge of desperation, as if touching his skin could infect Steve with Billy’s demons. Steve stares at Billy’s face, waits for it to calm the strained expression. 

Billy’s eyes shot open.

They’re void, glacial, as Billy rises from the bed to grab Steve in turn. The strength too much for Steve to fight back and he’s pushed on the bed near Billy, the mattress whines under the sudden weight, Steve is left breathless for a long instant. “Billy?” he pants, eyes out of their sockets.

Billy’s face is emotionless, a mask of indifference as his thick hands run to Steve’s neck. His fingers wrap around it tightly, knocking the air out of Steve’s lungs. He rasps Billy’s name again and again, kicks the air and shakes his arms, pushes against Billy’s chest from where he’s straddling on Steve’s body.

He feels Billy everywhere; on his neck, his chest and abdomen, his eyes are full of that cold nothing of his expression. Steve’s mouth opens in search of air, gapes and reaches for Billy’s face, hair, anything. But Billy is on him, blocking every option Steve has, he’s pinning him down with his whole body.

Steve thinks that’s it. What an army of demodogs couldn’t do in smelly creepy tunnels, Billy Hargrove does in his own bedroom. Because Steve let him in, opened his arms, let him punch him, eat with him. Even smoke by the pool where Barbara died. The thing is, Steve is scared but he’s not sorry. 

Looking in Billy’s eyes, seeing the nothing left behind, Steve understands that’s what his life is going to become. Maybe not now, or in ten years, but eventually. Because there are some traumas you just can’t run from, no matter how hard you try.

So, Steve guesses, dying on his bed with the boy he was so intended in saving, is the right way to go.

Instinctively, though, Steve keeps kicking, fighting, clasps on air as if his bat was right there. Without registering how because he’s slowly passing out, his hand connects with Billy’s cheek, Steve’s nails dig there and scratch at the skin.

Billy’s eyes blink once. Twice. Then he looks down at Steve, his grip loosens immediately as he backs off. Billy’s face is surprised, scared, sorry. “Steve” he murmurs, reaching for his face as Steve gasps air in, coughs so loudly it deafens him.

“Steve,” Billy says again, then climbs off the bed and curls up against the opposite wall, as far from panting Steve as he can. Billy’s hand clutch at his head and heavy breaths shake his ruined chest. It’s an horrifying moment for Steve, he perches over the end of the bed, spits, as he dry retches.

“God, God, God,” he hears Billy whisper, maybe to himself, maybe to Steve. 

It’s an infinite moment of panic, but finally Steve evens his breaths, falls back on the soft mattress and sighs profusely. His eyes closed against the natural light.

He hears Billy get out of the room, run the water in the bathroom and coming back. He taps lightly on Steve’s shoulder and the boy automatically flinches away, burned.

Billy gives Steve the glass of water, then takes big steps back, against the wall again. As Steve drinks he watches attentively Billy, like a little rabbit would look at the eagle which has just tried to catch it. The water hurts his throat as he swallows while Billy’s hands move as if they wanted to dig into the wall.

“Steve...” Billy starts, but it’s the last thing Steve needs before getting up and storming out, he does not pay Billy another glance.

He gets out of the house, barefoot, with a t-shirt and sweatpants too thin to keep him warm. He walks to the road and then picks a casual direction and walks again. He needs the air, the cold, the dark.

Billy’s still everywhere and Steve wishes he could disappear forever.

Every time Steve closes his eyes he sees the ultraviolet outline of Billy on him. It’s what makes him feel the colder, as he gets past the sleeping agents in the cars. He would scream if not even swallowing was this painful.

His hands frenetically run over his neck, he grips at it and takes deep breaths, trying to convince himself that he’s safe now, he’s alone. The forest surrounding him calms Steve, as he realizes monsters can be found inside as well. He’s not ashamed of the panic washing over him when the sun prickles between trees and his feet hurt on the scratchy asphalt.

He stops randomly against a tree, smells its healthy aroma to stop nausea from kicking in. He digs his nails in the bark, drags his hands up and down on it to ground himself.

He’s been too reckless. Played selfishly with his life, loved doing it; he just now understands how much he underestimated the danger. He was so sure Billy couldn’t seriously harm him, so sure. It’s stupid but he rasps a laugh out, it hurts and Steve wipes away his tears. 

Billy Hargrove looked like something was still controlling his body, his hands around Steve’s throat. The scientists have failed their tests if they thought it was okay to extend Billy’s leash as far as Steve’s house. Jim Hopper was right, he can’t.

Steve recollects himself by the time the sun is fully visible, he slowly walks backwards on his steps and gets lost on how much he’s actually walked in the first place.

The house is a warm hug around him, but a lot of things are off. For one, Steve feels like an intruder there, he almost doesn’t recognize the way in which the furniture is positioned, it’s odd to him, it’s not home.

Then he sits on the couch, back to the stairs even if his instincts scream for him to pay attention because someone might attack him from behind. 

He catches up when he runs his fingers under the pillow, while he’s trying to make the couch feel familiar once again. They caress the smooth fabric there, nothing intercepts them. Not crumbs, not his left courage, and definitely not his keys.

The sense of relief coming from that absence stuns him, his heart’s pace slows down.

Billy is gone.


End file.
